Mastering Sales Success: The 5 Essential Sales Stages for Deal Acceleration

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this playbook episode

of 30 Minutes to President's Club. My name is Armand Farouk,

and I'm here with my co host, Nick Siegelski. And folks, today we are

talking about the five sales stages that you can use to drive your

deals beginning to end and possibly accelerate your deals by combining

or skipping stages. Nick, why should people listen?

So, one of the Biggest problems sellers make when they

think about deals in their pipeline is they mistake activity for achievement.

Meaning they think they had a meeting, they showed a demo, we're

now in the demo stage. I gave my prospect pricing, we're now in

the proposal stage. And they get themselves mixed up because they

conflate having a meeting or sharing a certain piece of information

with where the prospect is in their pipeline. Buying journey and

the reality is, is buyers don't buy based on linear meetings,

buyers based on meeting certain thresholds were first, they acknowledge

a problem exists. Then they acknowledge the solution that you

have solves that problem. Then they get to a place where they

feel like, yeah, it solves it at a price that is worth paying.

In this episode, we're going to talk about a different way to think

about where your buyer is and some different tools in your toolkit

to actually accelerate their purchase based upon where they are at, which

is not meeting based. Whenever I've stepped in to run a sales team

or advise a founder that's trying to build their sales process

for the first time. The first thing that I will always map out is

what are the four or five things that we need to get your prospect to agree to,

independent of how many calls that happens on. Right.

And then from there, that allows us to design a two call closed flow or

a three call closed flow or a five call, 10 call closed flow based on how

quickly we can get those things depending on what our product looks like.

So if you know the things. Things you need to get your prospect to agree

to in the right order that allows you to start getting creative and

combining multiple stages into one call and drive deal acceleration because

you might not need to do a separate demo if you can get them to agree to a

solution in the first call instead of the second. So in this episode, we

are going to start with how to establish your sales stages and align

them with different exit criteria, and then we're going to talk through how

to run deal driving calls in each individual stage. All right, so let's

start with key concepts or principles when establishing

your sales stages. If you ever see a stage that sounds like demo or

the name of a meeting, which is a mistake I've made in the past, that is

probably a good sign that your sales stages aren't architected the right way.

What you want to do is you want to focus on not what are you doing?

In a sales stage, you're not doing a discovery call, you're not doing

a demo, but what are you trying to get? You're trying to get

problem agreement. And one way that you can get problem agreement is

through a discovery call. One way you can get solution agreement

is through a demo. But another way that you could get solution

agreement is you could do a Harbor tour demo at the end of a discovery

call, and then you forego the demo call entirely. Or you could do a POC.

To get solution agreement because you have a more complex solution.

And so the first rule of thumb is use exit criteria as your stages.

Do not use meetings as your sales stages. One other principle to

think through is while you can never skip stages. You can combine stages.

One area a lot of folks screw things up, where they'll inadvertently

skip a stage when they're thinking about their pipeline, is they'll

think, Hey, I told my customer directionally what this costs in the

first meeting, we're now all the way in the proposal stage, which

is close to closing. Just because you gave somebody pricing,

doesn't mean you're in the proposal. Posal stage, because

you have not hit the exit criteria of the previous stages.

So you can't ever skip stages. However, you can

combine stages and get multiple exit criteria in one meeting, in

one interaction. One very common example of this is you might

show a demo to a prospect and at the 45 minute mark of your 60 minute

demo, they're like, this thing is awesome. This solves my problem.

You might then transition into giving them pricing in that same meeting and

getting them to say, yeah, that looks pretty good. That's directionally

aligned with what we were expecting to pay. You now are at a place

where you have progressed to that deal beyond just yes, solution agreement.

So you can combine exit criteria. You can't skip

exit criteria. So let's do a quick rattle of the five sales stages,

the exit criteria for each, the common people involved in achieving

that exit criteria, and then the ways you can get that exit criteria.

So stage one is what we call problem agreement. Your champion is usually

the stakeholder who needs to agree that there is a problem

that is worth solving for the organization. The most common way

that you will get to problem agreement is through a discovery call.

But there are other ways that you can get problem agreement that

you might not be Right. So one example of this is you might have a

conversation with them and they think they have a problem, but you

and the prospect need to validate whether or not that problem is

actually a problem by doing something like a data or a process audit.

So one example, when I sold ERP systems to law firms, law firms would

always complain about the billing process and they would say, Oh, we have

all sorts of rejections and deductions and write downs on our bills.

We need to solve this. But then when we actually. Validated what percentage

of their bills were being written down against industry averages for

their practice group. They realized they were actually better than

the industry average and it wouldn't be worth spending hundreds of

thousands of dollars to fix this non problem. So there's times that

you actually need to do more or do different things to get that

problem agreement. There's another example here for a

client that I advise. Their name is BRM labs. Think of them as a CRM

for buyers, AK BRM. And one of the things that they help buyers do

is they help them track all of their software subscriptions so that

they make sure that they never miss a renewal. Or if they do renew,

they're not accidentally. Renewing more seats than they needed when they

bought that software And so the first thing that they'll do after a

discovery call is they'll actually hook into all of their credit card

accounts They'll pull all of their contracts and they'll show them.

Hey, this is how many renewals you've already missed And if the answer

is zero, it's a little bit less compelling than what they usually find

Which is i've found 30 renewals that you missed Now, do you really want

to see the solution? Great, we have problem agreement.

So when you think about problem agreement, there are multiple levels to

what good looks like when you're achieving the exit criteria here.

The worst is, this would happen all the time when I was selling compensation

software at PAVE, a rep would say, They love Pave. That is not a

problem at all. That is the worst. The middle, okay, is the

champion says that they're spending hours and hours and hours compensation

planning and it's a huge operational pain for them. That's okay because

it's a big problem for the champion, but it's not really a big deal.

Business problem. They're not losing masses of money.

It's one problem. It's a process problem for an individual

contributor But a great problem sounds like the champion is spending

so much time Manually planning compensation and spreadsheets and that's

leading to compensation mistakes because they literally don't have the

time to oversee All of the decisions from all the managers, and they've

seen a few people making semi inequitable comp decisions, and we have

to ratchet down on it. And literally, the CEO put their fist down,

and they're like, you guys have to button up this process.

That is great. Problem agreement. So as you think about de

risking your own deals, and when you decide to move a deal out of

pipeline into stage two, or as a leader, when you start to do

pipeline reviews, these are the types of places you should be asking

questions to really make sure that you've checked off that exit criteria.

So that brings us to stage two, which is solution agreement, right?

So solution agreement means, Hey, you agreed that you had this problem

in the previous stage, and now you've seen what we have to offer.

And you know enough about our solution to be like, yeah, you

guys are like really, really best equipped to solve that problem.

The people involved are usually the champion still, and it's usually

the champion plus one. Sometimes that's someone above the line, but

usually it is someone either at the line across. So for example, if

you're meeting with a director of mid market sales, it might be a

director of enterprise sales, or it is someone on that person's team.

So if I was meeting with the director of RebOps, it might be the

at deal desk manager. And there are multiple ways that you can get

solution agreement. The most common way that you get solution agreement

is through a demo, which is what most people know. But there are other

ways you can get a solution agreement. So the most common way

is after that 30 minute discovery call, you might do a 60 minute demo, or

that demo might actually happen inside of the first discovery call.

So again, multiple ways to accomplish solution agreement, either inside

of the first call, or it might require a separate call, or you might have

such a complex solution that you actually need to do three demos.

And then you have to do a POC on top of that. Or you have to do

three demos, a POC, a technical validation, and possibly even an

initial business case, just to really show that we can manage all of your

integrations and things like that before we even get to the next stage.

Right. So then for solution agreement, bad solution

agreement sounds like Armand, we had a great demo and they

asked me for pricing. That is not concrete enough.

That is not explicit enough to exit that stage. Great solution agreement

sounds like Armand, I asked them at the end. So at this point, like,

you know what we do, we know how we solve that problem we talked about.

I guess if this thing were free, like, Could you see this actually

being something that you would want to use on a regular basis?

If the answer to that is no, well, then you're not exiting.

But you have to be very, very explicit of like, independent of price,

is this the solution you would like to use? That brings us to

stage 3, which is very similar to stage two. The key difference is

the altitude of the person who is validating this exit criteria.

So stage three is solution and problem agreement from power.

Somebody who is above the line who can make a purchasing decision.

So the people involved in this stage are still going to be your champion,

maybe that plus one. But the key here is you need to have

power involved in this to exit this stage. You need validation

from power. That the problem is a problem big

enough worth solving. So exiting stage one again with that person

and that the solution that you have adequately solves that problem in

a way that they're like, yeah, this is something that I would like.

Again, there's a lot of similarities in this, this stage three and stage two.

And so you're going to be doing similar things, showing that demo.

Maybe doing the POC, potentially building a shared business case

with your champion to co present to power. But there's some other

things that you might start to pull into this stage to get that

agreement from power. Those would be things like bringing in an exec

from your side to meet with an exec on their side to have that exec

to exec one on one. You might do the roadmap sale call where you

pull in somebody from your product team to say, Hey, this is where

our product is today. But check out where it's going to be

in a quarter in six months, in two years. And you get them

excited about that. You might. Also, in a big enough

deal, start to pull in references now to get THEM selling on your behalf.

While this is a very similar stage to stage 2, this is where you start

to really get creative and open up your toolkit. When it comes to checking

off exit criteria for power agreement, one of the biggest things that

you want to look for is not just, did power like? The solution, but number

one, does power see this problem as something that is top three in

all of the priorities they need to support? And then number two, do

they see you as someone who is adequately equipped to support them and their

scale as an organization? So a lot of times, for example, you'll have

someone in power who will be like, This is a really great solution,

but it's not the right priority for us right now. Even though it's a

problem, it's a problem I'm willing to let burn. Or you'll see someone

in power who's like, this is a massive problem for us to solve.

It's a huge priority. But I'm going to be honest, like, I like

what you're doing. I like where the vision is going.

But I've implemented early stage software like this a couple of times,

and I just know once we get into implementation, this thing is probably

going to break. And those are the two places you need to dig in.

You need to really make sure that this problem matters to Power, and

you need to really make sure that Power believes that you can actually

solve their problem. So stage four is full commercial agreement.

Not just agreement on pricing, but full contractual terms

agreement, which includes pricing. In order to exit this

stage, You need to have got an agreement that the problem is worth solving.

Your solution solves that problem in a great way. And at a fair contractual

price and terms place. The people involved in this, you're still

going to have your champion involved in this helping drive things.

You're going to have power involved in this. And typically there

is a financial stakeholder who's going to be involved.

Maybe somebody in procurement, maybe a CFO, etc.

The ways that you typically exit this stage and drive it through

are a formal proposal meeting, some negotiation conversations, which might

be a couple conversations. It might be one, it might happen in the

proposal meeting. And then typically, you're going to have

some engagement with procurement in a bigger upper mid market

or enterprise sale. When you think about what good exit criteria or bad

exit criteria sounds like good exit criteria is This price 100 percent works.

We've mapped out all the key contract terms, and we've gone through the

budget approval process. Bad exit criteria is a champion's like, I think

this price could work. And then you move it to vendor review stage,

which is the next stage. And then they're like, Oh, wait, no, could this

be a three year deal? Oh, wait, this isn't budgeted for in

finance, we need to literally go bring this to finance first.

There are a lot of things outside of just agreeing with the high level price

that need to happen for you to one get All of the terms mapped out

and then to even extract that budget from the rest of the organization.

Well, to the point of you can't skip stages, I can't tell you the

number of times that early in a sales process, someone was like, yeah,

I'd love to take a look at the contract and just see what it is.

Okay, well just because I sent over a contract after the second call,

that doesn't mean we're in the vendor review stage. That's another sort of

bad exit criteria of is they asked for a contract when clearly they're

not ready to sign one. Again, if you are in demo stage, a lot of times you

will share a proposal. And just because you're sharing a proposal,

then if you didn't get problem agreement, solution agreement, power

agreement first, even though you are sharing a proposal, it is not

in commercial agreement stage yet, right? And that doesn't mean that

you can't actually be sort of progressing multiple parts of the sale or

multiple stages at once. You might still, you're not going to

say, Nope, we're not in that stage yet. I can't give you

anything to look at. You might say, OK, yeah, I'm going to.

Simultaneously or in parallel work on stages, but you can't say, Oh,

it's accelerated to that point, correct? However, if we've done

a good job here in this commercial agreement stage, we now move to

stage five, which is full vendor approval. What this means, the

exit criteria for this is very, very clear. You've got a

signed contract. The people who you're going to need to work

with on the prospect's side to do that include your champion, power,

probably finance, probably security, legal, to make sure

that everything related to signing a formal contract is thumbsed up.

Ways that you actually exit the vendor review stage is not just send

them a contract and wait for them to sign it. You'll be doing things

like having legal to legal calls where you work through red

lines on the contract. You'll probably want to be having regular check

ins with your champion to unstick parts of the vendor review process.

You're probably going to pull in someone on their IT or security

team to do a more formal security review. And those are the

ways that you should be thinking about moving through that

vendor review stage. Yeah, and this one's pretty obvious.

What good exit criteria sounds like is you have a fully executed

contract signed. The only bad exit criteria that I could think of

because the final stage is closed one is if you close one an opportunity,

and maybe they signed a contract, but it was like an illegitimate

contract where you didn't finish vendor review yet. They still need to

do security review. There are a bunch of contingencies

on it, whatever. But that is an edge case. So the exit criteria

for this is you have a fully approved contract. Vendor contract that

includes legal security and anything else that needs to be done to close

one the opportunity So to recap the five stages were problem agreement

solution agreement power agreement commercial agreement and vendor

approval five stages This doesn't mean five calls. It doesn't mean three.

It doesn't mean seven when I was at carta all of these things Could

happen in one call where we would get on. Someone has been on Carta

four different times. We would literally be like, what's the problem

you're trying to solve. Great. Need to issue out options.

Quick Harbor tour demo. Nothing's changed. Power agreement.

You're the CFO commercial agreement. Here's the price.

There's a discount on it because your law firm works with us.

Vendor approval. It's three grand. There is no it approval.

Send me the contract. It's literally all done in one call.

When I was selling a 300 K deal at pave, I had three months of nothing.

A vendor of you calls and that sat in stage five and there were

probably 20 calls minimum in stage five alone. So that's an example

of how it can be elongated or shortened. So now that you know

your five sales stages, we are still going to give you an example call

framework that you can use with in those stages, which will represent the

most common call that is usually used to achieve that exit criteria.

So before we actually get into those individual calls, Armand, let's

actually talk about how you game plan for those calls, because the

agenda that you set up front and the structure that you follow in

these meetings should be oriented around the exit criteria for the stage

that you were in that you were aiming to achieve. And so before you get

into the meeting, you have to think about. What am I trying to get?

That's going to be your agenda that you set. And at the end of the

meeting, when most folks just talk about next steps, that's when you're

going to validate whether or not the meeting made progress or got through

that exit criteria. There is a concept that will carry throughout

every single call that you will use to make sure that your calls are actually

driving your sales cycle forward and you're not just doing a demo for

the sake of doing a demo. The beginning and end of each sales call are

oftentimes your agenda and your next steps. Those are your

steering wheels. In other words, when you're setting an

agenda, you usually say, this is what we're trying to achieve.

That's the steering wheel that makes sure that the purpose of this

call is aimed toward achieving the exit criteria in the stage.

And then at the end, end of the call before you set next steps,

usually what you're doing is you're saying, Hey, did we achieve

that exit criteria? And then you're using your steering wheel

again to say, awesome. So the next step that will achieve the next

exit criteria is a demo or a meeting with power or whatever it might be.

So the beginning and the end of the call are oftentimes acting as

your steering wheels. And those happen in every single call

in your sales cycle. And then the middle part of the call in a discovery

call, those are discovery questions on a demo. It's the demo itself on

a presentation to power. It's a business case or a proposal

or a presentation. That middle part of the call is your ignition

that actually moves you forward and gets you to achieve the exit criteria.

So again, to recap, agenda sets the exit criteria for this call.

Middle part of the call achieves the exit criteria.

Next steps. Recap and make sure that you achieve that exit

criteria, and then they set the exit criteria for the next call.

So let's say I'm in stage one, where I'm trying to get that

problem agreement. The way my agenda is going to sound is like this.

I'm going to say, Armand, really the purpose for today is for us to figure

out like, Can we even help you solve anything as it relates to your law firm's

back office operations? I guess in terms of how we get there, it might be

helpful to get a sense of, like, the top two to three things that you're focused

on as it relates to your billing, accounting, and, like, client

back office processes. And then I can give you a sense of, like,

how we work with a couple other law firms in the Chicago area.

And then I guess I'm thinking we should probably end about five

minutes early to talk about, like, Does it make sense for us to

keep talking after today? Are there problems that you have that we

can actually address? Does it make sense for us to show you

a deeper dive demo? So that's sort of how I'm thinking we

should spend our time. Does, does that sound fair to you?

What Nick's done is he's made it clear that the goal was to get

to problem agreement. He's told me how we're going to get there.

Got alignment for me from there. We're oftentimes

going to run the discovery call itself. We're not going to

go into the depths of how to run a discovery call on this call.

And then he will go to the end of the call, which we end with what we call

it the five minute drill. Right. And in the five minute

drill, what I am doing is I am trying to validate with the prospect,

whether or not we hit that exit criteria. And so the way that

I do that is I ask three questions at the end of the meeting.

Do you want to buy? Not literally, but do you want to keep

looking at this? Is this worth your time to keep exploring

to buy this thing? When do you want to buy? I'm trying to get a

sense of the timing for when they want to have something like

this in place, because this helps me qualify. Is this worth our

time right now? And then. I advise them on

how they should buy. I'll give some input of, okay, if you want to keep

exploring, if this is generally directionally when you want something in

place, here's what I would recommend you do next. So the way that I'm

going to end these calls is with what we call the five minute drill.

And a lot of times there's this conventional advice in sales that

you should always be setting a next step. That's actually a really

common mistake because if you finish discovery call. And your prospect

literally doesn't care about the problem you're solving.

A lot of times they will still agree to a demo because they want

to go window shopping. There are three questions that you're

going to ask at the end of every single call. And the last one talks

about setting next steps. The first question is, do you want to buy?

Now, when you ask this, you're not literally going to say, Hey,

Do you want to buy? What you want to do is you want to say

something like this. Hey Nick, honestly, like, I think there's

something here. You mentioned that your employees were

really, like, not understanding how their stock options worked.

You mentioned that you've had a couple of employees leave for

higher salaries, even though they had a bunch of equity on the table.

And I think these are problems worth solving. Honestly, between you

and I, it's going to take a lot of resources. For us to keep going

through all these demos, a proof of concept, all this stuff.

Is that a problem that you actually feel like is something

that your team would realistically invest in? And is it worth spending

more time together? Or is this a little bit of like a nice to have?

You really want to push them to check off the exit criteria of problem

agreement in the stage. Once they say yes, then I can move to the next

question, which is, when do you want to buy? In order to know what

next step I need to set. I need to understand what is important in terms of

when they need to go live. And so I might say, look, it sounds like

you're going to do a big comp cycle in Q2, and it's Q1 now.

And that probably means directionally, we want to have this thing like

contract signed and like starting to implement around February so you

can go live in April. Does that directionally sound like the

right timing for this kind of thing? Awesome.

So what I'm doing is I'm directionally setting Go live and contract

sign date, but I'm not giving a formal, formal walk back plan yet.

That will happen on future calls. And then the

final question is, how do you buy? And that ends in a period.

It's not actually a question. The key with this one is

you always want to suggest next steps because you've sold your software or

your product a million times more than they have bought your product.

And so here's what that might sound like. Well, awesome.

Sounds like we're directionally aligned that like this is a problem

that's worth solving. Usually the next step from here is we would

want to make sure that you feel like we're the best equipped to

solve that problem, aka solution agreement. And the way we would

accomplish that is we would go through a 60 minute deep dive demo with

you and probably one of your other peers, maybe. Um, your Director

of Compensation over there in EMEA. From there, if that goes

well, we would do the same thing and we would bring that proposal up to Jane,

your Chief People Officer. Does that sound about right?

And so what I'm doing is I'm saying, here's how people have usually

bought in the past. Here's the next step and what we're trying

to get in the next step, the exit criteria. And then here's the

next, next step. What are we going to do two calls from now

to get the stage three? So now that you understand

that steering wheel and ignition analogy around orienting your prospect

around the exit criteria and validating whether or not you got at the end,

let's go through the five different sales stages. We will talk about the

most common call or the most common play that you use to get

that exit criteria. And then let's actually talk about a couple

different ways that you can combine or accelerate through multiple exit

criteria in one meeting. Two ways that you can start to accelerate

through stage two, which is also getting solution agreement is one before

that first discovery call. I really like sending my prospects a pre

watch or a pre read that teases just a little bit about our solution.

This accomplishes two things. One, it gets them excited

about what you do to. It almost primes them to be thinking about

the problem area that you solve for. So when I sell our

podcast sponsorships, Armand, I literally have a 92nd video where

I talk through how. big the audience is, and it goes through

some actually basic demographic information. And so when I show

up with the prospect, they're already excited about getting in front

of a really, really big audience that is aligned with their ICP.

So that's one way that I start to accelerate through.

I haven't achieved the exit criteria, but I've made progress on

getting through that solution agreement. One other thing that I'll

do, this is when we sell our club pass offering is we'll frequently meet

with a champion on a first meeting and we'll get 15 minutes in, And

we'll spend the last like seven minutes doing a harbor tour demo of

the club pass solution. And we get them excited enough about this thing

where they're nodding their head and they're like, yeah, this looks

really, really good that they're willing to bring their boss

into the next meeting. And we actually end up accelerating almost all

the way through stage three, because now we have power involved

on the second call instead of the third. So let's go through

stage two again, solution agreement. The most common way

that you will achieve solution agreement is typically through what

we call either a big team meeting or a 60 minute deep dive demo.

The way that call is usually structured is upfront.

You're going to set your PPO agenda, which the goal of this call is you agree

that this was a problem in the past, and we want to make sure that we can

actually be the people that are going to solve that problem for you.

The way we're going to do that is through a demo, yada, yada, yada.

So that now brings us to stage 2, where we are looking to get

solution agreement. This typically is that champion plus one.

And the big mistakes that I see sellers make in this demo where they

have new stakeholders in the room is they think, I gotta do some discovery

Aramond, and they start their discovery back at square one, where they

have somebody that they had a full 30 minute conversation with, and

they're like, And somebody new, and they start asking all of these questions

of that somebody new, and they burn a ton of time. And the champion's sitting

there being like, uh, I thought we were going to see the software.

The other mistake that I see people make is they know that there's

already that context, and they assume that the new stakeholder has gotten the

full download, and they jump right into things. Both ends of that

spectrum, you have a ton of risk of having the meeting

blow up in your face. So the way that you're going to structure this

call is as follows. You're going to set your agenda.

With your normal purpose plan outcome. And that purpose

usually sounds like we're trying to achieve solution agreement.

These are the problems that you wanted to solve. We need to make sure that

we're well equipped to solve them from there. I like to run this

out of what we call a big team demo deck. And there's actually

a link to a template inside of the show notes. If you'd like to follow

along as you go, the first slide is you want to recap all the problems that they

shared, all the problems of the champion shared in that first discovery call.

Your second slide is you're usually giving a high level overview.

Of how you can solve them one slide. Hey, you mentioned

that you have these four problems. Here are the three

things that we do to solve those problems. And the third slide

is a blank slide where you just have the faces of each individual

stakeholder on the call and you go one by one and you ask each person.

Hey, which of the problems that we mentioned are especially

important to you? Or, what did we miss that's particularly

important to the compensation function versus the finance

function versus the recruiting function? You want to make sure

that each person has the opportunity to say, yes, all of those problems

on the discovery call were 100 percent on point, or no, this is the

only one that matters, or no, you actually missed these three.

From there, you now have a really clean punch list of things

you can call back to. And now as you demo, you're going to use

a lot of what we call past questions where you might say, Hey, Jane,

you mentioned a little bit earlier, either on the past call or earlier

in this call that the employees were constantly complaining about the

fact that they had no idea how much it costed to exercise their options.

And they would oftentimes forget that these options are actually deeply,

deeply in the money and worth 10 times more than what they originally

came in and saw. This is what they would see inside of Pave today.

I'm curious, how does this compare to what they've been using in the past?

So you do multiple callbacks throughout your demo, where you're

constantly asking past questions to validate the things that you've

learned in Discovery, and that you've set up on the front end of your demo.

And then at the end of the call, again, you're going to run

the five minute drill. Or sometimes this becomes the 15 minute drill,

because usually what happens is you say, Hey, at this point, you've

probably seen everything that our solution has to offer, at least on

the high level, we can always go deeper on the integrations, the

permissions, all this other stuff, based on the problem that

you're trying to solve. And based on what we've shown you so far,

Naturally, you know, our software is not free. Do you see this as

something that is at least semi worth investing your time into

independent of the cost? That's the first question you ask in

the five minute drill. From there, you're going to get a little bit more

detailed on the timeline. And now you might start to get a little bit more

granular on when you're going to loop in power, what it looks like to

secure budget, et cetera. And then you're going to set your next step, which

is usually the goal is to get to power agreement. That said, some ways that

we can accelerate through this stage and make progress on future stages,

if I want to get power agreement faster, there's a world where I can get

power to join that first deep dive demo that I do. Typically, in order to

do this, I need to have shown some degree of a harbor tour, a high level

overview in the back half of my first meeting with my champion, to

the point that they're like, yeah, that's I feel good about this thing.

I want to bring my box in. So that's one way we can make progress

on power agreement. Another thing that we can do to accelerate into

the commercial agreement and through commercial agreement is if I have

power on this meeting and I am able to nail a really tight 40 minute,

Mini discovery up front and demo and they're not in their heads and this

thing's going well, I might budget 12 minutes to go through pricing

and give them a proposal. And now we're already talking commercials.

I don't have to set a whole separate call to do that.

So those are two acceleration tactics in that stage

that we can use. So to be clear, at the end of stage two, if

you ran a big team demo, you're actually going to set Two meetings

in your next steps. The first is you're going to set the big

team meeting with power. And then before that, let's say that big team

meeting was on Wednesday, you might set the champion prep call on a Monday

so that you have a full day to update the deck and all that stuff.

This is the perfect time to ask your champion to get on a text basis

instead of email. So I might literally say like, Hey Nick, I

want to make sure that we really nail this meeting with Jane.

Is it okay if I shoot you a text or like give you a quick call before

this meeting, just so I really make sure that we come in prepared.

They will always say yes, because you're trying to make sure

that they look good. And then you still send them the meeting invite

and you probably still be on zoom anyways, but you can use that text later.

All right. So let's talk about the champion sandwich.

Prep call the bottom part of that sandwich. Usually what you're

doing is you want to get three things out of it. The first is you

want to shake the post a little bit. You want to make sure,

Hey, are you still feeling good about this thing? It's sort of like you're

there with your best friend on wedding day. You're in the back and

you're like, Hey, like we got this thing, right? Like, you know,

this is the problem you want to solve. You know, this is

the right solution. All right, great. You're still feeling

strong conviction. Let's move forward. Second thing you're

looking for is tell me everything that you know about what