Show The Product on The First Call: The GENIUS High Velocity Sales Blueprint | Mallika Sahay

0:00 You said show product in the first meeting. I can guarantee you 50% of sales leaders right now are thumping their sales bible saying you're going to hell. Don't demo, do a product tour. The two things are different. We know that buyers are itching to see the product and we know typically we need to do discovery to be able to unlock that. What often happens especially in a high velocity sale when someone knows they're trying to move fast is they're like I just wanted to see the product and as from a selling side we're just saying no no no please answer these. Starts the deal off on the wrong foot. The purpose of a product tour is almost the same elevator pitch that you would give in slides. Don't use slides. Instead, just show them. Which means this is still something you can do within 1 minute and it still the purpose is to kick off your discovery. You're giving them a glimpse of the different capabilities of it, which often I found one allows you to start asking discovery questions sooner than you would. Two, you can start to see the kind of prospect's reactions and feedback and you can start to see what's peing their curiosity and what's not.

0:50 And that just allows you to actually start asking questions right there. Good morning everybody and welcome to this leadership episode of 30 minutes the president's club. My name is Arman Foke and I'm here with my co-host Mark Kaslo and today I'm talking really quickly. You know why Mark? Because we're talking about high velocity sales motion. The key to a high velocity sales motion is not speaking as quickly as humanly possible. It is listening to this episode with the one and only Malikica Sah. So by background I actually know Malikica because I worked with a couple of co-workers from what we called the segment mafia at pave and segment had an elite go to market team as they went from 10 to 100 million plus in ARR and then eventually got acquired by Twilio for three billion bucks. Mica built and scaled the entire SMB sales and sales development organization over at segment. She's done that at three different companies and she knows high velocity selling better than almost anyone that I know. And this is a clinic and how to build that motion yourself.

1:49 So Mark, why should people listen? We didn't really talk about this specifically, but I think the reason that people should listen to this is we get into high velocity deals, which I think when people hear that, they think transactional. This is not about transactional deals. Transactional deals are deals where someone is just giving you money and you need to transact for them. That's the order taker philosophy, right? Like I stand at the ballpark, I take your money, give you a ticket.

2:13 That's a transactional sale. High velocity sales is a mentality. It's an urgency. It's a it's a program that you run because you need to close a deal faster in order to have a better chance of winning. You create velocity in that deal. And it's high velocity, right? So, one way to might maybe look at it is for every,000 of revenue, it takes you one day in a high velocity deal cycle to close it. So, $3,000 deals should be done in three days if it's high velocity. $20,000 deals done in 20 days if high velocity. Anything longer than that that still gets you good rates, that's not high velocity. That's just a regular consultative deal. So, I think we really get into how do you orchestrate a situation where you can speed your deals up and create a high velocity situation and a 3 2 1. That's right. All righty, Malica. Welcome to the show. We start every show with your top three actionable leadership takeaways. Let's get your three. Number one, show don't tell. Use a product tour in your first call, which is different than a product demo, to give a glimpse of the solution rather than just using slides. Show your prospect versus just telling them allows you to way more quickly allow them to start asking questions to do discovery and potentially identify additional use cases and stakeholders. And in this, it's not a demo. You are talking about the solution. You're not diving into features, but rather you're telling a story with the product and using it to highlight the product's capabilities and use cases. For example, uh back when I was at census, it is a tool that sends data from your data warehouse where it lives into your your end tools, Salesforce marketing tools, your customer success tools in a product tour. For example, on the first first slide at the beginning, I may show the homepage which shows all of my list of integrations saying, "Hey, my customer attributes are pulled from my data warehouse, sent into Salesforce's custom object for our CSNs to use." Someone can understand what this end state looks like and using that I'm going to tell a story. I can tell the story around how census is going to allow you to retrieve that customer data that usually since locked into a data warehouse and actually get it into the hands of your teams who need it every single day. And the way I'm going to do this is by first very simply said hooking up to my where the data uh connections where the data lives. It could be my data warehouses.

4:18 It could be other databases anywhere your engineering teams are holding this data. Um next I'm going to show how easy it is to set this up. Typically the alternative is actually to write custom code. We all know that takes a very long time. often that means Python scripts wrapped in duct tape. Here I'm going to show you literally a flip of a switch and it is up and running. And finally I can show you how easy it is to see it in your integrations. And there I'm going to pause and start to do discovery. Ask what peaked their curiosity. If I notice someone's eyes kind of flicker at a certain part, I'm going to pause and ask that person what's going on. And that's going to open the door of I have now given them a glimpse of the solution.

4:51 Let's now talk about it. And I'm going to start doing much deeper discovery and get to probably what would have taken me to the end of call two. hopefully by part with your pup call one demo in stories not in features. What's number two? Number two is talk their talk. Use their lingo to build credibility. Um often it takes a long time to build rapport and credibility in high velocity sales. You don't have the luxury of time. Figure out what are a few phrases that they use that they would say to their peers probably not to people outside their function and drop that into your conversations. So earlier I mentioned Python scripts and ducttape.

5:23 No one else is going to use that terminology except for maybe a couple data engineers talking amongst themselves. As soon as you see that, you'll often get a chuckle and it tells you, okay, I'm speaking their language. I think I've earned more of the right to start asking the heavy-handed questions. Boom. What's number three? Number three is think outside the box when it comes to trials. In high velocity sales, you can rewrite the playbook because you have to do things fast and still get the same outcome. So, be creative when it comes to triing the product. With a data integration product, instead of asking a company to hook up their production data warehouse, hook up their, let's say, Salesforce instances, I would need a security review, probably legal sign off, and probably some sort of PC agreement for that. See if I can actually get a sandbox environment for my own company and allowed those with prospects to test up very similar workflows. As long as I can get to about 80% of that, the prospect ideally is seeing what they need to to get the technical validation. And if not, if they still need to test a little bit on their own instance, you now have at least a few days to do that in parallel while they're still testing it. So you get that techno validation much faster.

6:21 One of the things that we're learning so far, a constant theme on what we've talked about uh Malikica is transactional sales and I think that that has different definitions for a lot of people. So when you say transactional like help me understand like give me the overall context of what you mean by transactional. Yeah. Yeah, when I think I think high velocity, which doesn't necessarily mean transactional, it still means you're selling a highv value product. There's a lot of ROI to be proven, but in high velocity, you need to move fast. And this could happen in a few ways. It could be that there's a lot of similar products in the market. And so people understand the pain, they understand the types of solutions, they can go through the buying process much faster because there's already a line item in the budget. Or it could mean, let's say you're selling to a small company that just needs to move fast.

7:05 This could still be a category creation product. um you just need to move fast to do that. And so I think transactional and high velocity can be overlapping. They don't have to be, but high velocity um you still need to achieve the same outcome that let's say an enterprise deal would. You just have a very condensed amount of time to do it for either a product that's more simple or let's say a lower price point or there could be a couple other characteristics.

7:26 So we start all the way at the top of the funnel. You talked a lot about what an AE has to do different. Let's talk about how to get that high velocity pipeline because if I'm closing deals in 7 days, that means I got every 7 days I got to replace a deal, right? So, how do you approach high velocity prospecting? Typically in those in my experience in those those are either um lower ACV or they're more like SMB kind of lower mid-market and so often those don't have BDR teams built out because the ROI just doesn't end up working out. So usually those organizations have a very heavy partnership with marketing who and they're actually going to generate a lot of that inbound demand coming in. So you would expect every day you need to have at least one or two new qualification calls coming in and every week you are really building up qualified pipeline from a prospecting and that's where like I would think about outbound into a target account list. So it's going to say for this month or for my quarter there's these strategic logos. It could be still small deals or larger deals, but these are the ones we really want to put everything behind and we don't want to do a big marketing campaign for them.

8:28 We want AES to really prospect into them. So, in addition to running my qualification calls that are coming from inbound leads, I'm also doing a bit of prospecting into a very specific set of accounts. I think in high velocity sales, you need to watch the metrics across the entire sales cycle so closely. I think often as AEES we look at how many discovery calls do I have? How many trials do I have? What's my ACV? What's my rain weight? And often we ignore how many new meetings do I have coming up this week? What's my qualification rate? Um and those top of the funnel metrics are so important because I need to focus on closing my deals this week, this month, this quarter. But if I don't have enough early in my cycle, I'm going to have a dry pipeline soon. And so I think watching those top of the funnel metrics is some days more important than the midfunnel or ended funnel. And that's why I think especially from a leadership perspective, we can be the ones to make sure the top of the funnel is performing well and allow our reps to really focus on execute on the deals as they come in front of you. I will help make sure that the deals are getting to where they need to be. I read this book called Thinking in Bets and it was written by a professional poker player named Annie Dukes. I read this book and I for some reason I got this is feels like an awesome sales book even though it had nothing to do with sales really. But the key concept in there is the reason that betting can be so scientific is because your feedback loop is so short. So like I make a bet and then I see almost instantly if I win or not. I make a bet on an educated, you know, whatever. I can see if I won or not. And right away you get that feedback loop that allows you to rapidly iterate. I would say high velocity sales is like that for sales.

9:57 That's your place where you get immediate feedback. And so but you have to be measuring the right metrics. And Arman and I just did this big long recording on metrics that we're releasing soon. Maybe you could take us through like the top two or three highlevel metrics that you want to make sure that you're watching because rapid iteration means that there's stuff to learn there all the time. It's going to depend on the time frame, but I would say let's say on average on a weekly basis. My theory is I'm top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and then of course end of the funnel. So assuming you're already watching revenue number, are you close to quota attainment? top of the funnel I'm watching and uh I would say for me the most notable metric is number of sales qualified opportunities generated per week across the team plus per person um and then the midfunnel and usually that's where I look at historically if we look at our conversion rates from stage to stage which one for us is either the most important um because that's where we know of like if we get to X stage in our deal we know we're good for a lot of companies as often as soon as we get the technical win we're like we know we're good we have a good chance of closing the deal um or it could be the most problematic IC stage. So it could be we know going from discovery getting into the trials. Historically we've just had a ton of issues because people don't have enough urgency to solve the problem or things like that. So again always try to find one top of the funnel which for me is number of sales qualified opportunities. Also a great way to build a very strong partnership between SDR organizations and AD organizations since that is a shared goal marketing included. And then I would do a midfunnel metric. Um and the one other thought I will say on the metrics piece is I floss sales allows us in sales to actually bring the blend of art and science. Often I see that non- sales teams are focusing on this. Marketing has so much experimentation. Product management has experimentation.

11:39 Engineering does. And I think historically sales which is thought of we don't experiment. We don't think about metrics. And I think in this new era especially in high velocity sales the more that we can marry the art and the science the better we can do and I think the more fun the job is. to tie off the piece on building high velocity pipeline. I was working with founder the other day and they're selling like 3,000 $4,000 deals and we have an SDR who's prospecting above 10k deals but is also like finding some of these smaller deals and he was like why don't we just hire like five SDRs to like find these 3K deals. I'm like well your unit economics are going to be totally screwed. And he was like well then what do I do for marketing? And I was like well you can run paid ads, you can start doing content. you can start doing PLG because you have a trial motion. And if I'm a sales leader listening to this, I'm wondering like if I want to shake my lead tree and ask my marketing team, go find me more leads, what am I actually asking my marketing team to do? If you think back at census or any other high velocity sales or that you've run, where did the majority of your leads come from? Like what does that usually look like? Referrals, word of mouth. Go find your most successful customers. Their networks are the ones who are going to bring you people who can be just as successful. Obviously, it means a lot of things. That means go to conferences and events where these people are. Be in the communities that they care about. A lot of these companies are champions and stakeholders, the ones who are just trying to understand how to be better at their craft. And that's where I think the consultative sales and that kind of peer-to-peer learning comes in. As sellers, we see hundreds and thousands and really the bird's eye view of what the best of the best are doing and what the problems that are coming up. those learnings we can help share with prospects who are thinking about it and that allows us kind of meet them where they are at and when they're ready uh to be able to think about a solution we're right there also. So I think the word of mouth and referrals have really been the best and that's at early stage companies that is also at companies that are at 100 million in ARR. We've figured out a little bit about what high velocity sales are how to think about pipeline.

13:33 The next thing is all right now I got the do my pipeline and I'm ready to meet with them. In our intro your first tip think is a hot take. You said show product in the first meeting. I can guarantee you 50% of sales leaders right now are thumping their sales bible saying you're going to hell. So tell me like one of why are you demoing in the first call? That doesn't sound right. Yeah, I'm going to say don't demo do a product tour. The two things are different. Demo I agree. You cannot demo a product until you have done full discovery. You truly need a tailored demo. I am 100% in that boat. A product tour does something else. We know that um buyers are itching to see the product and we know typically we need to do discovery to be able to unlock that. What often happens especially in a high velocity sale when someone knows they're trying to move fast is they're like I just wanted to see the product and as from a selling side we're just saying no no no please answer these questions and it just it starts a deal off on the wrong foot. And so the purpose of a product tour is almost the same elevator pitch that you would give in slides. Don't use slides almost don't yeah don't use slides.

14:36 Instead just show them. have a stage demo environment where you can really curate this story that showcases the capabilities of your solution and use that almost to give your elevator pitch. which means this is still something you can do within one minute and it's still the purpose is to kick off your discovery to real unlock a true product demo but what it allows you to do is one as soon as you show your screen often buyers get surprised pleasantly surprised that like oh I can see the product so fast you're giving them a glimpse of the different capabilities of it which often I found one allows you to start asking discovery questions sooner than you would um two you can start to see the kind of prospects uh reactions and feedback and you can start to see what's peing their curiosity and what's not and that just allows you to actually start asking questions right there. And I've also noticed it's a great and easy way to start bringing up additional use cases um and a great way to identify additional stakeholders much faster. So like if I'm talking to sales and I'm telling them, hey, I can get your sales data into from a data warehouse into your Salesforce instance and I Marquetto is also on the screen. I can also bring up we also have marketing instances or integrations like Marquetto. Is there anyone on the marketing side that may be interested? often sometimes you're like, "Oh, actually we should maybe go talk to Susie on the demand genen side." And that's a great person. And that for the second call where we're going to do a fully built out demo, I'm now have an additional stakeholder and potential champion to bring in. What's going on, folks? There are literally only two things that you need to nail as a salesperson if you want to make it to President's Club. The first is your ability to fill your calendar up with meetings and create new pipeline, aka prospecting. The other thing you have to nail is your ability to drive those deals to close. And since you've made it this far in the video, I've got a gift to help you do both of those things. If you use the code YouTube at 30mppc.com/courses, you'll actually get $50 off our two best courses to help you nail both the creation of Pipeline and the closing of Pipeline. The first course is called Cold Calls to President's Club. And in that course, we teach you what to do, what to say, and how to sound in every single part of a cold call. from your call opener to how you pitch to how you overcome objections to voicemails and gatekeepers and more. The second course is our discovery course which is focused on how to sell in a way that doesn't feel like selling. And in that course, we teach you how to uncover massive six and seven figure business problems that companies actually want to pay to solve.

16:58 And we'll teach you the way to structure your calls. We'll teach you the questions to ask. We'll teach you how to get to the decision maker and drive timeline and make discovery. something that you know how to do effortlessly. And again, if you go to 30MPPC.com/courses or go to the link below and use that code YouTube, you'll get $50 off any of the courses. I will see you at President's Club. you do like a harbor tour where you're taking like the entire platform and kind of trying to condense it into five to seven minutes or are you taking like a specific use case and saying look at how awesome we are at this let's see what kind of use cases that we should talk about with you it's a good question closer to the second so like from a time limit it should take 1 to 2 minutes it should not be a 5 to 7 minute thing the way I think about it is like this should be almost like an elevator pitch and so 5 to 7 minutes is no longer an elev elevator pitch. And so that's where depending on the complexity of the platform and how many use cases, if there is kind of one main capability, then I can use that to show parts of the product. Um, for example, often like on the navigation bar in the product, it may have tabs that we're not going to touch on. But even the fact that someone can see that may start to bring up questions or curiosities around it. If a product does have multiple use cases, then depending on the persona I'm talking to, I'm going to ideally have one use case story that end to end shows them like what would this look like for them in their role. And then ideally where it makes natural sense, try to also touch on are there tangential use cases that could be relevant for them or for additional teams at their company.

18:31 One time had a demo expert come in at outreach and train my team on experts. His name was Peter Cohen. Peter Cohen's number one thing he says is start with the best screen. And I think that's kind of what I hear you saying is is like let's not work through the whole workflow and finally like unveil after a few minutes. This is the coolness. Just take them right to the coolness and be like have you ever wanted to see this?

18:57 Here it is. You're looking at it right. Yeah. Now, one thing that worries me with this, if somebody if let's say I'm reporting to you and you're telling me to do this for my team, I'm immedately going to have a little red flag, which is people are going to look around that screen and they're going to start asking, "What's this? What's this? How's this work? How'd you get here?" How do you handle that situation when people start to take over the harbor tour and drive the boat? It's a great question.

19:20 So, there's a couple pieces. One is because the tour is so short. Often like if it's only taking a minute or two, you're moving through things through things pretty fast and often it does capture people's attention. If I'm spending too long on one page or kind of like one area, then yes, I think it begs a lot more room for people to start asking questions. If someone is really digging in, I would use that to start doing discovery to be like, "What about this is peing their curiosity so much?"

19:44 And my goal again as a seller is to try to get to their pain. So if you keep digging into one area, then like tell me why. And if that means my tour gets put on hold because we're now doing this fantastic discovery into this hopefully deep pain you have on this one area I would still call that a win. And that's also where I mean and Mark you mentioned earlier of like beauty of high velocity sales is there's so much room for experimentation. I don't think you can have a call go the same way every time.

20:06 You have to truly understand how to be agile. You have to understand how to understand people's reactions real time and really kind of change things on the fly. But it allows you opportunities to have so many more of those at bats where I find personally find that to be much less common if you're just going to a slide deck. Well, I was going to say this doesn't just apply to high velocity sales. Like when I was at Cardia and it was the 3K deals. If we saw a deal that was like a hot one call close, it was a 10 10 discovery call flow. It's like 10 minutes of discovery. It's like do they need evaluation? Okay, cool. It's clear there's a problem. 10 minutes of Harbor Tour and we call it like an open the box demo where like you they they basically just want you to open the box and be like okay like the product's in there like I'm not someone's not stealing something. You open the box, you show them like hey look the shoes that you bought are in there and then you close the box and then you use 10 minutes to actually like go through pricing and close the deal. That's like the one call close. But at both Carta and at Pave when I was closing 50k deals, even 100k deals, the discovery call flow was then 15 five and five. So it was like and then a five-minute Jenna. So it's like 15 minutes of discovery or 20 minutes discovery, five minute harbor tour. And the purpose of that harbor tour demo is to tease the next call. It's to like get them excited about like it's again it's literally like touring the harbor and just be like look at all these buildings. You can't go inside of them, but like look at what's around here. You use the last five minutes to set the next steps to get them to see the rest of the stuff. But I feel like in today's age, people get extremely extremely impatient when they can go demo products on people's websites and look up YouTube videos and all that stuff. And then there's like this big gate and this wall between the seller and the product. It's like a very antiquated run way to run a sales cycle to not show the product at all on a first call unless you're selling something like crazy complex like you're probably not going to demo SAP on the first call, but that's because the solution is just so massive.

21:58 I think the concept of give get is like not always on the front of a a seller's mind, but a give get means that there's an exchange of things that are of value. And guess who gets to decide what the value is? It's the person who's asking for it. So I might think a demo is just something I do. But if my buyer really wants it, then it could be a give or a get, right? For me to give them the demo. If I'm going to give them the demo, then I get to ask something for equal or lesser value back. And to your point earlier, if I'm going to give you a demo on the first call because you want it and it's valuable to you, I'm going to get back discovery and I'm going to get back pain points. If I'm going to give you a demo in the beginning, I'm going to get that technical person on the next call to do a deeper dive. And reps really need to think about this. It's not manipulative.

22:44 It's just fair and how equal humans participate with each other versus most reps just want to give give and they're hoping at the end like they get the deal. Malikica, I think one other thing that comes up really commonly on the note of give gets is when people aren't willing to give in return in velocity sales. The death of a velocity sales team or the death of a velocity seller is clinging on to the deals that are never going to move because that by definition is not velocity selling. That is slow selling.

23:13 And so when you're teaching your team to get deals on or off quickly, what are some of the signals or some of like the spidey senses that you're teaching your reps to make sure that they don't cling on to bad pipeline and they can identify a hot deal or DQ it out of their funnel as quickly as possible? Yeah, it's a great question. I think some of it comes from fear. Some of it is like if I close this deal, the deal is done. And I think the way I would reframe that is like is this the right time? are the ducks in a row that this is the deal we should be focusing on now or is it something that we actually need to close loss for now and revisit down the road? And so this doesn't mean the deal is done forever.

23:50 The deal is just not ready right now. And that could mean if you have one person and one champion who's gatekeeping you from the buy or other people, this person this is not the right time. Either this means like I need to then work on trying to get to someone else maybe uh trying to go a different avenue or just understand like why is this person gatekeeping? It could be because it's important to them, not important for anyone else right now because the pain is not strong enough, which means like I don't have the deal, I need to walk away from it. Um, or it could be something else. And so that's where I think part of it for reps to feel more comfortable is like because you closed this deal, right? Lost this deal right now doesn't mean the deal is dead. It's dead. It's not the time right now. Let's go find a deal that is much more right for you to put your efforts on. And let's make sure we keep tracking and understand what would it take to win this deal. So if it does require nurturing from our end, we can spend our efforts there because I think we've seen closed loss free engagements are some of the best deals that we'll ever close and such high win rates. Um and so the time is not now and it's okay to say that. I think that's what the fear is is like I didn't do my job well enough to win the deal and that's not true. I remember as a sales manager and as a leader at Carta, I would like open up a rep's pipeline and I'd see like 50 deals or like 30 deals in there. I'd be like I don't even like I can't deep dive all these deals. There's no way. And as a leader, you got to be able to be like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Like, here's how I can quickly like know if this deal is like on its way to closing or not.

25:07 So, for you, like you do a pipeline review in a high velocity sales organization. Like, what's on your pipe review checklist or the three questions you ask? Like, how do you even tear up a pipeline when it has so many deals in it? Yeah, it's a great question. I would say I don't think there's a perfect answer. I'm still like trying to figure out and I think it's different at every company. It's and I don't think there's a perfect solution. Um, I think some of it is like why is this a real deal and are we aligned on the timeline is part of it because I think often I find that a lot of the pieces may be there they have a pain we're to have the right people they're like interested and they want to test it out eventually but it's like are we aligned that we're going to solve this problem in the next let's say one month that's often when I dig in deep it's like there's we're not aligned there and that's because like yes they're curious but there's not enough pain and urg to actually drive urgency like we are going to sign now um or something else so that's one is like is this the real deal right now. Um, and then do we truly have the elements that we need of our deal? I think it changes for somewhat different products, but typically it's like do you truly have a champion that you've tested and you can actually say is like this is a true champion for my deal. Um, and then other elements like technical validation. I think often something especially in these types of deals that can be forgotten is uh competition. Of course, you're going to include competition in your discovery, but the more that you can know that upfront through the deal process, we can also kind of plant the seeds to help kind of help uh make sure our product's superior throughout uh without needing to then at the almost at the end of the trial then try to convince them of why we're better than the competitor or when it comes to the pricing piece as well. So, the more that we kind of understand early on and understand because we've seen these so many times given the sheer volume of deals that we're working, the more that we can plant those seeds in the beginning is fantastic. Um, so for example, in even a glimpse in the product tour or in the demo, being able to also highlight how do we differentiate ourselves above all of the competitors. I think just tying this one off, Malica, the two questions that you said are really, really similar to what we were doing at Carter, which is like in the simplest form, you need to make sure that you have problem and process locked down. And the first question you said encapsulates a lot of sub questions, but is there a problem that is worth solving in the next 30 days?

27:10 And it's like, if not, then it's probably not a real velocity deal. And in medpic, if it was a bigger deal, you'd quantify the pain, make sure there are metrics, but the reality is in velocity, like that stuff doesn't happen nearly as much. And then the second question is like, is there a process in place to make sure that they're actually going to go solve the problem? And sometimes it's literally the champion has 3k budget. Other times it's like you got to get this in front of a CFO. But if you know that there's a problem that they want to solve in the next 30 days and they have a process to get a signature and you can run that across 33k deals, that is much more than most velocity sales managers can say that they know about the deals in their pipeline because the reality is like you don't have the time to dig in for 20 minutes on one deal cuz that deal is going to be gone next week. Like you you got to have like hot potato on these things. We talked about a lot of good habits when building high velocity sales or but my guess is you've seen a lot of shows for lack of a better word.

28:06 What is the biggest mistake you've seen sales leaders make when they're building out a high velocity sales team? Sales motion it is they take the traditional sales cycle and just try to move through it as fast as possible. Like not possible. You need to go to a first principles perspective and really understand like what does this look like? What elements are needed and what do we not need? So that's on emotion on the team also first principles approach but like what are the competencies that you need in a seller not necessarily what just experience have they had and that's where I think um you are do need a team that can be agile that can experiment that like truly can help understand how to keep iterating on the sales cycle because you can't keep running the same one all the time um and so someone who can really be agile and help you build process and so that's where really understanding what are the competencies and potential you need to see in a candidate to feel like they're a good fit for the team, not just what roles have they been in. Um, so like, have you been amazing at something? It could be a job in a totally different career. Some of my best sales reps are the ones who come from the finance world, for example, or even recruiters would make some of the best sales reps.

29:07 And so, I think in general, high velocity sales motions means rethink the status quo. It gives you the opportunity to do that. Breaking the rules, Malikica, amazing show. Everyone, hang on for a 60cond recap coming up soon. All righty, Mark. It's time for a 2 by two recap from this episode with Malikica. What do you have for your two two by two? Number one is think that you can have a product story which is not a demo in your first call in order to create a momentum in a give situation so that you can actually speed up your deal cycles. People want to see the product.

29:38 The longer we make them wait, the more frustrated they get. This is a great way to show product to get something out of that first meeting that accelerates the deal. The second is I really liked how Malikica broke down her metrics. She said there is a top off ofunnel, a midfunnel, and a bottomfunnel. Key metric in high velocity deals that you must watch like a hawk. And I think that understanding that for high velocity, you're going to get rapid iteration, you need to make sure that you understand what those three key metrics are and keep an eye on them. Number three, when you're building out a high velocity sales motion, you can't just take your same sales motion and be like, great, I'm going to do the five calls in five days. You have to rethink from first principles what are the decisions and milestones that your prospect needs to go through and what is the most efficient way to get them through those milestones. So for example, if like your AES are doing the exact same harbor tour demo and your prospects are asking the exact same questions on the every single first discovery call, you might choose to surface a product demo or an initial trial as the first point in your go to market motion so that your AEES can just focus on closing those deals fast. So that's number three. And then lastly, number four is the two question pipeline review. You do not have time to run medic on every single deal in a high velocity sales motion. And so Malikica talked about a question to make sure that there's a problem we're solving.

30:58 And then she also talked about a question to make sure that there is a process in place to get this deal done. All righty, Mark. So if you liked this one, step one of building out a high velocity sales motion is building out your sales process. And so we wrote a piece that Mark actually inspired on the fivestage sales process. And five stage does not mean five calls. Five stage means the five decisions or things you need to get in order for a signature to happen. So step one is mapping out those five things. And then step two is figuring out how can you do those things in as few interactions as possible. Go check out that newsletter down in the show notes. And folks, we'll see you on the next one.

31:40 Hey. Hey. Hey.