“We need to learn how to bring in executives early in the sales cycle. That’s one of the huge secret weapons of much doing larger deals.” – Jamal Reimer in today’s Tip 1715
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Oracle
Mega Deal Secrets
Jamal Reimer on Linkedin
61: Jamal Reimer – Doing Mega Deals at Oracle (3X $50M+)
How to 10X Your Deal Size Even During The Economic Downturn – Jamal Reimer
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip is just a short excerpt from the full presentation audio that we just shared on the Sales Success Stories podcast today featuring Jamal Reimer’s top-rated presentation at last year’s Sales Success Summit on How to 10X your Deal Size Even During the Economic Downturn. Listen to this:
Jamal Reimer: I want you to think about this. You’re only one mega-deal away. You’re one mega-deal away, I mean, the relationships we want, the lifestyles we want, the roles we want, they’re all fueled and supported by the craft that we perfect. Are you ready for the secret? Of all the things that I could share, these are the biggest pieces of doing mega deals that I could share. Here they are.
Number one, executive whispering. I’ll tell you what that is in a minute. Number two, how to craft a mega deal premise. And number three, how to dominate how you run sales cycles because it’s completely different than how you do a sales cycle on a small deal.
All right, number one. Number one revolves around executive engagement. The executives are absolutely, positively necessary not only to be active in the deal, they need to drive the deal. Why? Because there’s too much fear, lack of responsibility, or accountability at the lower tiers to do anything transformative. Everybody’s too scared about doing something wrong, screwing up, not getting promoted, or maybe even getting fired. There are a lot of reps, and I was like this for a long time. There are a lot of reps that are intimidated with thinking about working with executives. Does it give you a little butterfly to talk with senior executives? That was me for a long time, and sometimes, it still is. It depends on the executive. Maybe you’re uncomfortable speaking with executives period. That was me in the early stages of my career. Maybe you could feel confident meeting with an executive once, but if you’re going to deal with them over and over, you’re going to feel like you’re over your head. Or maybe the flavor is that you might feel that, okay, people tell you you look cool, calm, and collected in front of an executive audience. But really inside, you’re feeling all that imposter syndrome, and you fear that everything is just going to fall apart any moment. And that’s just Jack. He’s the only one. He’s the only one who feels imposter syndrome.
Okay, so I have some good news and I have some bad news. Let’s get to the bad news. There is no way around learning this. If you want to become excellent, not only do you need to learn it, this has to become your job description. You need to become executive seller. The good news is, as you start on this journey, you don’t need to go it alone. You don’t need to be the only one in the room or the only one in the ring. You don’t need to go toe to toe with executives on your own from day one.
Now, let’s get into this concept, executive whispering. I define executive whispering as the art and science of working with executives on both sides of the table. There’s many aspects to it, but there are four big ones. We have to learn how to connect cold or warm. We got to connect with senior executives. We have to learn how to engage them in a business conversation. Then we’ve got to maintain getting access to them after they kick us down to work with their project team. Then we’ve got to build them into champions, because with all the energy and conviction that we might have in our product, it’s got to be somebody senior on the customer side to pull that thing over the line because there’s so much inertia within their own organizations.
Anyway, what is the typical way that most reps go about trying to initially connect with senior executives? Peer-to-peer. Customer sign executive. Do you think that’s the common way? Okay, it’s either bottom-up or cold email. And how often does that work? Or how long does it take to work? A long time. A long time. How much time do we have? What’s the maximum number of days that we have to achieve something? 365. That’s just to make our number. But if we want to overachieve 200, 300%, there is no way that we can hang on to these old ways doing business. We have to leverage. We have to leverage things that are oriented to existence, leverage relationships, leverage energy, positive or negative, leverage tools. We have to speed up.
Now, leveraging your own executives in many ways is the secret that’s right up there in front of us. A lot of reps don’t even think of using their own executives because they’re thinking too low. The other lot of reps are the ones who are like, I’ll use my executive at, and these are both not right. We need to learn how to bring in executives early in the sales cycle. That’s one of the huge secret weapons of much doing larger deals.
All right, this is the dynamics. Let’s go through it. Most sellers think of themselves as mountain climbers, thinking that we have to climb on ourselves to get to that senior executive. We got to take every step of the journey. But that’s not right. That’s run-rate thinking. Instead, we should think of ourselves as a heliskeeter who leverages a helicopter to get to the top of the mountain in 10 minutes and spends the rest of the day skiing down the other side. Our executives can be our helicopters. That’s like our first port call to look for a helicopter. This is the way to do it.
Scott Ingram: For links to connect with Jamal, to grab a copy of his Mega Deal Secrets book, and of course to the full presentation audio over on the Sales Success Stories Podcast, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1715 and you’ll find it all there. Once you’ve clicked over there, be sure to click back here for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!