My name's we are nice let's see how can we should we just start directly or you should I should be able to see when people drop In Rate, right? somehow people People are dropping in so we can get started with some small talk and then we can do intros. With small talk, that's the best. Okay, so let's introduce the concept, right? So we wanted to have a sort of a fireside chat today about practical ways to save Q4. And I was talking to Mafalda before we started in the green room, if we can call it that, about pet peeves. Right. About pet peeves. And one of the things that really sort of ticked me off when it comes to sales discussions is I've been sitting in so many rooms, both with CROs, CEOs, and consultants, entering a meeting, a sales meeting in like November, and saying something along the lines of, a good Q4 is built in Q2 or Q3. And you should have done your pipeline preparation. You should have outbounded more. And it's like, yeah, shoulda, woulda, coulda. Thank you. Very helpful. But now it's November and we all need to get paid. So do you have anything to offer to the discussion instead of sort of looking backwards what we could have done? And since we want to be pragmatic and we want to see how we can actually help people out with these things, we collected very, very knowledgeable people in this room. To talk about exactly that, how can we save our Q4 or make sure that we reach and exceed, ideally exceed targets. And without further ado, I will introduce our guests or I will rather have our guests introduce themselves, starting with Mafalda. Hey, hey, George. Thanks for having me. Not the first rodeo for none of us. I'm super happy to be sharing this virtual stage with all of you again. So yeah, for those who don't know me, which is probably all of you. So my name is Mafalda. I'm Portuguese. I live in Berlin. I'm currently head of business development at UpCloud. But business development is my sales passion. So just to warn you that all of my advice throughout the, you know, the session will be more on top of the funnel, which is what I usually do. And yeah, aside from that, I have two sales podcasts. All these amazing people, Sarah, Thibault and George have featured there. One is about sales training mistakes to avoid. And the other one is sales is to interview buyer personas. So feel free to see if your buyer persona is there because I interview them and I show them a prospect email at the end. And last but not least, I just finished yesterday to write my prospecting book in Portuguese. So if there are any Portuguese speakers in the house, yeah. Keep, you know, I will keep you in the loop. So that's me. Thank you very much, Mafalda. And it's a nice change for you to be a guest for once and not the host. So you can sort of chill for at least one session. Amazing, serious people should, you should put links to them. It's amazing. Nice. Hi to all of you. Brilliant. Brilliant. Thank you very much. Very good to have you. Next up is Thibault. Go ahead. Yeah. Thanks, George. Hi, everyone. So yeah, my name is Thibault Souiris. That's pronounced like that. And I'm basically helping and, you know, through training, coaching and consulting, I'm basically helping sales people book more meetings and close bigger deals faster. And I've been, you know, like working in sales since I'm 15 years old. Right now I live in Mexico, but I used to live in Germany and France, pretty much all around. And really my focus is really around prospecting and using the proactive selling methodology to qualify and disqualify your opportunities. So that's really what I'm going to be talking about today is how, you know, the pipeline you have, how to make sure that it's something that's a real pipeline and that you have a chance to close something before the end of Q4. So that's really what I do. Except that I'm French and Swiss. I guess I said I live in Mexico. I have a little boy called Luca who is amazing. And yeah, excited to dive into this webinar with everyone. Brilliant. Thank you very much. And welcome. Last but not least, Sarah. Hi, guys. I will do some hygienics for the webinar before I do my introductions. So questions go to the questions section. We will answer them at the end of the session or maybe during if it's a very interesting question to the team. And we will spend an hour. So we will end in 55 minutes. We will try to end in 55 minutes. Comments, et cetera, you can put in the audience chat and we will monitor and I will throw up things there if I find interesting things in your chat. My introduction, Sarah Storm is my name. I've been in revenue for 22 years now. My entire career has been around sales. Mid segment is my segment. I've been in SaaS since 2012. And sales and marketing technology is my nerdiness. I find it very interesting. So I'm sure we're going to be talking about how we're not going to rely on systems, which also is the year because they won't help us. Unfortunately, it's too late for that. I also have a book on Amazon about SDR work. Also love top of funnel. But primarily right now in projects, we are working on closing the year for the customers we have. So this is a very top of mind situation for both me and George. And George, you also need to do an introduction. I just realized I'm not last. You're going to go last. So that's me. I'm super excited to be here. And yeah, let's get started. I forgot about myself, which is interesting. Okay, so then I will do my intro too. But before I do that, I will also talk slightly about the webinar stuff. There is a poll too. I would very much like to understand how confident we feel as a group for the quarter. We are now almost a month and a half out because people are going to disappear in the middle of December. But okay, let's do my intro. My name is George. Also 22 years in sales. I have sold virtually everything under the sun from real estate to credit cards, training, software, consultancy, what have you. The last 11, 12 I've been in B2B SaaS. My segment is enterprise and following the rest of the group when it comes to funnel stages. My specialty has primarily been to do with closing. The rest is, in that group, the rest is, I think, Sarah's and Mahalda's expertise, the top funnel. And with that, I think we should start with, we should just dive right in and start talking about practical tips on how to maneuver the quarter. And I will use the opposite order this time. So Sarah can start. Let's dive into it. So when it comes to saving the quarter and ergo saving the year, I have a few things that I feel a lot of sales teams aren't getting the support they need from their managers to sort of produce and do the last couple of months of the year. So I have three things I want to address. Number one is what we need to do this week. So deal clinic needs to be happening right now, because if we are behind, we need, first of all, to fully understand what we can save the year with. And at the moment, I am sure that there are plenty of sales teams out there who have a bloated pipeline filled with deals that are not actually going to close this year. But it looks good on paper. And we're reporting to the board and to the management team. And we feel sort of good with the numbers, but not really. And when you're in that situation, as a salesperson, you know this feeling. It's a bad feeling in the stomach. As a VP sales of CRO, you probably don't feel that feeling because you're going on the data that you're getting. So deal clinic needs to happen like tomorrow, because we need to kill off deals. And when I say kill off deals, I don't mean kill them forever. I mean, kill them for now, because there are plenty of deals in our pipeline that might close next quarter. But that's not going to help us today, is it? So we need to have a deal clinic where we really go through the pipeline we have. We need to go through the ones that are in later stages of the pipe to make sure that we have an action plan for each of these deals once we decide that that's based on our criteria. As a business, if we're going to keep them there or not. And we also need to look at the pre-stages, the early stages of the deals. Is there anything there that we can drive faster than what we're expecting? Based on the first meeting, based on discovery, what do we know about these deals that make us make a good decision related to them being pushed forward in the funnel or not? And the second part of deal clinic should also be looking at the deals that we have closed last this year. Because a lot of companies, when you look at B2B sales, a lot of companies will actually stay in the same status quo. They will not have chosen a vendor. The process would have died without them moving anywhere. And there might be budget left this year to use on something before the year ends. So going through your closed-loss deals for this year and seeing if there's anything we can re-engage quickly should also be part of the deal clinic that needs to happen, like tomorrow, at least during this week, if we're going to have a chance to do something proactively with them. So that's my first recommendation for CROs and BP sales. Sara, sorry, before you move on, there was a good point in the chat I wanted to ask you to comment on. Nina says to ensure that deal reviews, deal clinics is actually supporting the teams instead of, just tell me where the deal is and what have you done? Why are there no notes there? All of these very, very helpful stuff that sales managers pull. And I know you have opinions about that. I do. That's a great point. I'm sorry. I just assume that that's why we do deal clinics, that the point is for them to be helpful, right? And you're right. I have sat in some deal clinics where the point is, give me reporting that I can see in the CRM. And this is not helpful. We fully agree on this. And I think that one of the things, when I worked as an individual contributor, which I did for years and years, I did this for myself. So this is something a salesperson could do on their own as well, because we need to take the temperature of our actual time to feel secure that our forecasting is correct. So when you go in and you have a manager who does what Nina is saying we shouldn't do, this is something you can do on your own because you don't have time to change your manager's leadership. Now you need to take accountability for yourself, right? And if you have a sales manager who does want to help you, which you can very easily judge if you work with them for a while, then doing a deal saving, the point here is to go to basically my next point, which is action plan on each deal we're going to keep. And the next point is all hands on deck. Because one of the things that we can see a lot in companies working B2B SaaS specifically, which is what we do a lot, me and George, is that we have an idea that we're existing in a vacuum. As a sales individual, we're driving process on our own. And sales is a team job. If you're looking to save a quarter, we need to get all hands on deck. And that leads sort of into the next step, which is, so how do we make sure that these deals progresses? Once we've identified what we need to do, and that might be that we need to multi-thread with the help of our VP sales. The VP sales of our company might need to reach out to the VP sales in their company to do an executive summary. Or maybe our CEO should reach out to the CEO of that company to talk about executive summary and where we are in the process to align with higher level leadership if we're talking on a lower level. We also might want to increase number of touch points in the process. And those touch points needs to be valuable. We're not circling back. Like we need to stop doing that altogether. That's not just a cue for advice. That's a stop circling back guys. So since we're not going to circle back, we're going to offer value. One of the things that we might need to do when we're doing all hands on deck to multi-thread and to provide value is to go to our CTO to ask for a specific summary of whatever integration they want. We might want to go to marketing and ask for a video related to whatever they got excited about in the video. We might want to talk to our coworkers who are selling to other accounts because they know someone in the account. We need to collaborate around these deals if we're going to have a chance to really turn the year around. And a lot of years can be turned around if we collaborate. But if we continue working in a vacuum, it's super, a lot harder at least to succeed with this. But yes, this is to help the VP sales or the CRO remain in their role and have their job. Like this is obviously something that needs to be helpful for all involved parties. So that's the second step of this. So what can we do now to progress the deal? And the third part that I want to address is timeline discussions with prospects. Because when we sit on our chamber and we get asked, so when will this deal close? And we haven't actually discussed time with the prospects. We don't know. It's a guess. And being in the dark in this situation is the worst thing you can, it's the worst place you can be in. So if you're getting ghosted, the deal is out. If you're having active conversations with the deal, then you need to sit down now. And talk about when they want to be live. If you're selling platform, right? When does this company want to be live in your platform? And then we calculate back. And then we decide, okay, so you need to sign beginning of December for that timeline to happen. Why does that timeline matter to you? Why is it that urgent? Why do you want to be live the second of February or whatever date they choose? And if they tell you we can be live next summer, again, then that deal goes into Q1 pipeline. It doesn't stay in the Q4 one. Because now we know. So that are my three things. So deal planning tomorrow, killing off deals and moving them and focusing in on the ones that we will. Number two, multi-thread and all hands on deck. Number three, talk timeline with your prospects. So these are my three points that I think is super important that we have a tendency of forgetting about when we're stressed, which a lot of people are right now. Thank you very much, Sarah. I want to ask the rest of the panel if they want to ask or ask. Anything before we go to the next person? No comments? No notes? Perfect. Brilliant. All right. Up next, Thibaut. I'm very unsure about the pronunciation. I hope I didn't. If I did, I'm sorry. Go ahead. That's right. You did it right. So Thibaut is how you say it. So here I see Hugo says agree 100%. I'm asking. So like personally, I think Bant is great for inbound leads. It's a terrible thing. I mean, I hate like being on the receiving end of a Bant. Because if you go and you book a meeting, you know, with a company and then there's a junior SDR who has barely any idea, you know, what you're doing. They ask you, okay, what's the budget? What's the authority? What's the need? What's the timeline? That's all great in theory. But if you have a conversation that's driven by Bant, it's often really hard to get a good sense of opportunity and the buyer hates that. So what I found is that there are three words, three things you need to check in any deal you want to have, three questions you need to answer is like the cause. So what's causing people to have a conversation with you? What are the outcomes they want from this conversation? And when can they make a decision? And that's for me, that's like the way I qualify deals is I, want to find an answer to all these questions. So obviously you're not going to your deal or discovery call and doing this and say, okay, what's causing you to do that? What are the outcomes? And when can you make a decision? You kind of dilute that over the conversation and the different conversations you have with people. And that's a really good way to check if your pipeline is real or if it's something that's not going to happen. You take all your deals and you answer these questions. Okay. What's causing these people to have a conversation with me? Why did this person reach out to, or why did they accept the call after I prospected? And very often you're going to see that you have no answer for that or, or they were interested in seeing our product. That's not a cause or they wanted to chat with me so they could see a demo. That's not a cause. A cause is what's causing you. So, you know, we, for example, you could say something like they want to do a revamp of the website and they have to do it by the 1st of March, for example, that would be a cause. So they would be really understanding what's their initiative, their project for having a conversation with you. This one's really important. Another one. So the outcomes and you know, that's really important to do is what are the outcomes expect from the conversation with you? So if I'm doing a website prevent and you're selling a headless CMS, for example, what they want to do is take all their kind of WordPress data and everything and be able to integrate it in their different units. So they're not like, you know, they don't have to go and spend too much time on it. Waste too much time doing some manual uploads and all things like that. So really technical stuff about your offering. And the most important for me is the decision. So when can you make a decision? It's a great question to ask to people because, you know, with this, you have a better idea if they're serious or not. So if people cannot make a decision, they say, oh, I don't really know. We don't really have a clear timeline or whatever. You don't have a deal. You can kill this deal. And as Sarah said, it doesn't mean you won't ever have a deal. But right now for Q4, it's not going to move further. So it's really decision. When can you make a decision is really important. And so these three things, of course, outcomes decision can come from proactive selling, which is a sales methodology that really helps you qualify, disqualify really early. And they are really, really important because they replace, you know, all the magic band and all this really complex stuff that kind of make a conversation really processed and really kind of robotic. And that's the thing. You can go to all your deals and check and answer these questions. And if you don't have an answer, you can go back to your prospect. And as Sarah suggested, do some clinics and get these answers. And often, you know, you're going to be faced with something where you don't really want to do it because, you know, the answer is, I don't know. They don't know. So the deal is not going to move further. And that's really something you can do right now. And most likely, you know, a lot of people will not want to do that because what's going to happen is that you're going to be faced with a pipeline that's a lot smaller. Than what it is. And that's really a scary thought. So do it as fast as you can. And then, you know, accept the situation that maybe you thought you had one million pipeline, but it's actually a hundred thousand. And, you know, you know, by identifying the problem, you can start working towards solving it. And that's really something important. Brilliant. Thank you very much. I actually have a question for you. When it comes to, let's say that you, first of all, I want to say that I agree with you with abbreviated methodologies. Most of you here know my opinion about those, but the question when it comes to, let's say that you don't have a timeline or you don't have a clear pain rate. Because we say now let's close it at loss. Do you have any experience of maneuvering that conversation? Let's say in the first follow-up or the second meeting, right? And you hear that I do my review. I call up a few of my prospects and they say, so, yeah, but I don't know. Is there, do you have any advice on how, if it is possible to sort of salvage some of these for this end of the year? I mean, you can salvage a deal that didn't exist in the first place. So you're not going to go and convince people to buy your stuff or to change that timeline. There's no need, there's no problem. There's no kind of a clear cause of why they're reaching out to you and something they want to solve. You can do everything you want, but it's not going to close. So for me, it's more, don't try to salvage it. Try to understand if it's a real deal or if it's not. And that's really something that's so important. Because I don't know, like I give you an example. I went to, so I moved to Mexico not so long ago. I moved to Mexico in 2016. And I'm checking different golf clubs, you know, like golf places to go and play and check if I can get a membership. I ask a bunch of questions to everyone, check the membership, the price. And a lot of salespeople, what they would do is take my interest in knowing the price as an opportunity. But the thing is, I'm not willing to spend this, you know, within three or six months. I'm just like checking, testing the water, getting like a feel for things. I'm just a tire kicker. I have no intention to make any decision and no amount of discount. Or anything will actually get me to actually go and make a decision to buy it. Because I'm not in the market for that. So what I would say is that don't go and try to salvage a deal. Try to get a clear idea. Is it a deal or is it not? And the faster you do it, the better it is. Can I add to that too? Because I think this is such an interesting conversation to have. So one of the things, because once we've done the discovery, if we have done it poorly, ergo, we don't know if it's a deal yet, right? Because those are the situations that are very common. We've done discovery halfway to 100%. So we don't fully know and can't really qualify. One of the things that I've seen a lot, people seem to be hesitant to go back and redo the discovery. And in those situations, you say that you have a discovery, two weeks later, you haven't heard from the customer, you sent a summary, you're not really sure where the deal is, pick up the phone, call them, get them on a half an hour more and do a rediscovery. Like there are ways we, it's completely fine to tell a prospect. I feel like I didn't really get a grasp on where we are. Can we have a check-in and have a discussion? I also want to share a bit about another case that we just brought in or something that is valuable, right? I want to talk to you about a use case that I thought about after our meeting. So let's have a chat and then let's redo discovery. Because one of the things that I have noticed a lot when I was an individual contributor, there is a power in being fully transparent with the customer. There is a power in saying, so I didn't fully get everything that I needed. I didn't fully understand what your timeline is. I don't even know if you guys have urgency. Should we have a conversation? Because if they don't want to have that conversation, then the deal is not now. It just is clear. Like I don't want to have a conversation with you. So we failed or the customer is not in need right now, which is fine. But if they jump on that call and they have that, they spend that time with you, it's very likely that it is a deal that you just don't know enough about to be able to re-qualify. But go back, re-qualify. Because asking these questions, it's the same when I have discovery meetings now, we're on the consultancy side, but when we have discovery meetings, if I don't feel like I got enough, I will call the day after. But I have four more things I want to talk to you about. Nothing is stopping us. Like we're not, we're talking to people and they are probably as stressed as we are in most situations because the year is ending for them too. So how about we sort of cut through the bullshit and we start having actual conversations where we ask open questions about what's going on to better understand where they are. And then we can make the decision. And once we have that information, we can proceed. That's my sort of view. I don't know if you guys agree with that or that we, or if you guys see that in sales things you have worked in, that this is the challenge to sort of accept that I didn't fully did, I didn't fully do what I was supposed to do now. So let's do it again or let's do it more. Yeah, I can, I can actually add to that, ask you, I had a CEO before that he would ask us questions about how the discovery went. If you missed, I at least one out of the, out of five basic questions on the discovery, he will tell us, go back, pick up the phone and tell them I screwed up. I need to do the first meeting again. It's like, yeah, but what if I send them an email and say, no discovery again, it's, it's wrong. No deal will progress if we don't do disco properly. And this is where a lot of, a lot of sales teams suffer a lot because we really have no control. We don't know what the deals are, which is the main thing that we're trying to nail today. What both Sarah and Thibault was on about in, in their segments that it is paramount to a disqualify and the things that stay that you have timeline, you have control over the deal and you know where it would land. One of my main KPIs as a VP sales was forecast accuracy. So when we say we're going to close something, we need to know how much it's going to be and when it's going to land. Otherwise we're leaving it completely on the customer, which is yeah. Not great because they will never have as much urgency as we do. That's my sort of my two cents. And I agree that it's better to basically kill your babies, right? Kill your darlings when it comes to pipeline and have a hundred K lean than a hundred K lean. One million bloated. Sarah. Yes. Yeah. I want to address one more thing that the gold was talking about. Like if it wasn't a deal from the start. And one thing you mentioned was that it's scary to kill your darlings. Like here you are with a million in pipeline standing in front of your manager or here you are with a hundred thousand in pipeline, which is a huge difference, right? And I think that we need to shift our mentality and we need to do that now to save the year. If that's the situation we're in that killing your darlings and going down to a hundred, thousand tells you what to do now, because if you're at a hundred thousand and you were expecting to have a pipeline that was actually worth a million, what do you need to do? You need to create new deals now, like tomorrow to cover up that part. So the idea that we, because we have a tendency as people to shut our eyes to ourselves too, like we're fooling ourselves. And this is not something that will give you the speed you need and the focus you need. We need to see reality as it is. And this is the best way to get to that point. So it is, if we look at it as not scary, but this will give me an action plan. It feels a lot more tangible. And another thing that I want to say is that we're talking, if we're looking at mid-segment and we're selling things that has six to eight weeks of closing time, that closing time can be pushed down to three and a half weeks. So if you create meetings today that starts coming in next week, you can actually close deals on that. If your only focus is to close deals, if you stop doing everything else, oh my God, we have leisure time. It doesn't mean we're being lazy. It just means that we're being distracted. Like this is an ongoing challenge with most roles and specifically in sales. We're distracted. Right now, maybe it's not the time to build personal brand on LinkedIn. Maybe right now, the only thing we should be doing is focusing in on the deals we have in our pipe and do everything we can with our team's help to close them. So this is about priorities. But if we don't know that our pipeline is tiny, we won't do the right things. Make sense? Right? So I think that we need to stop fooling ourselves. Brilliant. Yeah, no, I agree. And I want to say one more thing before I pass the mic to Mafalda to tie into the circling back thing that we talked about. I think that transparency is never bad. So calling a person up and saying, look, we've been working on this for a while. I have a month and a half month to make my year. Okay. So let's save each other time. Let's discuss where we are. Realistically, you have a job to do. I have a job to do. So pretending, because I see that with so many reps and managers, pretending that we're not in sales is not a great strategy. Everybody knows we have a quarter to close. Right? So yeah, I just wanted to see how you are. I said, no, you didn't. You want to maneuver your pipe. Just be transparent with people. Do you think they don't know what you're doing? Your title is sales director. Do you think people believe that you're doing PR? Like transparency, again, transparency is very much appreciated by people. And also, if we're not transparent, people will see through that too. And with that said, Mafalda, you have the floor. Thank you. I would like to start answering the first question. Which is what can we do for Q4 by answering the fantastic question that Leandro put on the chat? Because I think it's a good segue. And Leandro, while I start answering your question, if you don't mind to write down your ICPN by persona, so I can hopefully be a bit more focused. So yes, deliverability, which I think it goes hand in hand with what can you do tomorrow to maybe increase a bit your pipeline. Right? Like Sarah, Thibault and George mentioned, now you need to build pipeline. Or even if you didn't, you still need to build pipeline. So I would say that going to technicalities that would help deliverability would really help. So first of all, is really tiny things that can make the difference between your email landing on spam or it doesn't. And they are super boring, but they might be the difference between landing on spam or doesn't. First of all, warming up your email. Do you use a tool that's warming up your inbox? If you don't, go on Google and warm up inbox tools. They're pretty cheap. I really recommend you to do. It's really technical, but that might be the reason why they're not landing on inbox. Then, thanks Thibault. Then I use Warmly if I'm not mistaken. Then if you have your inbox warmed up, the second thing you need to check is if, for example, on the first email that you sent to your recipient doesn't have any links, any attachments, your signature with your beautiful picture and company website, remove that. Because all of that might be the reason why you're still landing on spam. Again, these are not sexy tips, but they're something you can change tomorrow. That might be the difference that will actually land to your prospect and they open the email. So you have that. Make sure that the email you have is the correct one. And so I would use a tool to scrape the data, but also to double check. Because many times you have a thumbs up from the scraping data tool, but then when you double check, might be a spam trap. A spam trap are emails that actually exist, but they are made by companies to catch people like us. So let's make sure that we overcome that. So those are technical things. Really, really not sexy, but they might make a difference for email prospecting. And then, so this is the technical spam. And then the mental spam, which is something that Jen Allen, a sales trainer that I absolutely love mentioned is the mental spam. So now we did everything that the email is in the inbox. How can we make our prospect to open it by the subject line? And the thing is a lot of SDRs, and I've been interviewing for BDRs for my department and all of them, even experienced ones make this mistake, which is they try to sell on the subject line. The subject line, the only purpose is to make you open the email. That's it. And the way you can do that is really short. Let's say two, three, words like cloud costs, your growth, something like that. Really, really boring because boring means familiar, means doesn't mean sales, doesn't mean marketing. That's why it usually works. So, so these would be my small tips to make your email prospecting, you know, land where it should, you know, very, very, you know, quickly. So that's, that's the other thing. So, so you, you have a senior level procurement operations manager. Okay. So I would really in this kind of, I love that you mentioned compliance and regulations, because that's actually a good segue for my next point, which is answering the first question of this webinar. What can we do to, you know, to help build pipeline before the end of the year? So this is something you should be doing no matter when, but interestingly, if you interview your customers, a lot of companies, it's either marketing or product or no one who interviews the customers, right? So I really recommend that if you work in business development or in sales, that you actually go and you ask your customer success manager, Hey, I want to speak with a good customer from this industry, this buyer persona. And I would, I would like to understand what he or she is going through. What's going on in their life. And just to give you a very practical example, I did it two weeks ago, three weeks ago, because I also joined this company beginning of September and I was speaking and this goes again, Leandro to the compliance thing that you just mentioned. So I was speaking to the CTO of, of a FinTech company from Norway. And I found out that the reason why they chose me primarily our, our product was compliance. And we didn't do it. So I didn't know that because I'm not a CTO and I don't deal with compliance. Right. That's not my thing. I have my legal team doing that for me. So I went to, to look up on that. And I found out that Dora has to be done by January 17th. And as a salesperson, I was like, this is music to my ears. This is urgency, not fake one, a real one. So, so basically if, if, if I still have CTOs dealing with this, this is going to, this, this have to close this year, you know, because there is a legal deadline to these that I, as a salesperson didn't invent. So for me, that was a breakthrough. And I, I created all the messaging for my team based on that. And, and we've been having a lot of traction because it's a real pain. A lot of people haven't done it yet because we know human beings, we always procrastinate. So, so, so definitely my recommendation, long story short is even though it's already November 4th, if you can squeeze one or two customer interviews this week, and you can, I would start there. And I would really understand which event led, led them to you. So trigger why you and yet your competition and what's going on right now for them. What's, what's pressing for them. And if you have these answers, you probably can find verticals before the end of the year where you can use the same messaging and have hopefully some marketing support. But if not go on LinkedIn, post about it every day. I don't want to hear excuses. Marketing didn't do that. Like the same way we shouldn't be lying to ourselves. We also shouldn't put the responsibility to other departments. Having marketing is great. If you cannot have marketing, you still have the same targets for outbound. So you should focus on that. Yeah. So that's it. That's basically my, my answer to the question. I have a question Mafalda for you because I'm damaged, right? I'm, I'm an individual contributor in my soul. Like this is the, the thing that I think around the most. One of my questions is because interviewing existing customers is in this situation with six weeks to go. I understand why I have already done this work because I do it every time I get a new job because I want to know what's going on. My question is, would you also, because what I'm thinking is that I would go in and find 10 prospect prospects. I would invite them to that chat based on the same framework. Not why did you choose me, but rather I'm doing a deeper understanding of the market. Let me buy you a coffee and just have a chat or online. Let's just have a chat. Find a few of them on LinkedIn, ask them to sit down. People who are in the prospects group that you're targeting with the buyer persona role that you want, because those interviews can easily turn into deals that will close before the year ends. So would you in this situation with six weeks left, do customers or would you do prospects? I would try to do both because you shouldn't in the sense that like it's possible, right? So like a chat like this would be half an hour tops and, and also like do half an hour, use a transcript. So you don't have to take notes and transcribe. You have AI, use it on your favor. Then keep the transcript. Go to chat GPT, ask it to, to summarize done. So, so to be honest, you can squeeze customers and on customers in the same week and you can iterate as you go. And as Sarah said, and it's really well said, and I also, I've been also interviewing our customers. If you have a good conversation, they might be able, they might say, actually, what do you do again? Oh, that sounds interesting. And I'll say, well, I can share next week if you like. Right. So it's definitely a great way to break the ice with prospects while you learn. And while you might build some pipeline on the side for sure. And the other thing I would say as well is, well, two things still on the, on the, on the, on the prospecting side. I'm almost sure. Cause I'm almost in every single company that are leads like flying around and laying around somewhere hidden that we don't know of. And so I, so the same way you have like low hanging fruit from deals, you probably also have that in the leads. So even on the other day, I had someone from marketing say, Hey, I have these leads from an ebook. And I'm like, who is taking care of them? And they're like, no. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Like to me, I don't want any leads. You know, like what, what is that? So I'm, I'm almost sure you have something, an ebook, something, someone forgot with some leads that might have shown at least interest in the topic that you can try to squeeze a call in. That's the one thing. And on the other hand, I really doubt. And again, I've been working with a lot of like SDR companies, not only as their manager, but also as consultant. And I speak with a lot of people in the area and I don't know one single BDR, me included, who is really good in every single channel. So I'm almost sure that you can train someone this week in either email or LinkedIn or, or video or cold calling to improve your numbers, like really tactical. So see where the gap is. Cause you're going to find it. Brilliant. Thank you very much. And now I think it is my turn. And let's see if I can keep this in time because I have a couple of points here. All right. So let's start with let's start with structure. What can we do structurally to, to save the quarter? I'm looking at this primarily from a managerial perspective, but I will go down to, to the ownership of the structure in detail. So as Sarah mentioned before, sales is a team sport. And usually this, this, this motto is very much misused. What the, what the management teams usually mean when they say sales is a team sport, they mean the rest of the sales team. And that's not the point. The point is, is that when we're trying to fix a quarter, the company is trying to fix the quarter, not the sales team, not the rep, not the CRO, not the solution engineer is, is the entire company needs to make the quarter. Right? So once we take the steps that my friends in this panel talked about now, and we drilled down to, let's say we have five to 10 deals per rep, or if you're a founder or an agency owner, you can take the steps that you need to close your quarter. Right? And I know my Sarah, for instance, loves tech. A lot of people love CRMs. What I do is I put these things in an Excel sheet. I can give you whoever is interesting. I can give you my framework. So we put 10 deals in a, in a, in an Excel sheet. We say where they are, what amount, what amount is it to be closed on that deal? What the urgency is, what the likelihood is, what the time is for the quarter and what needs to get done for that to close. So is it a feature request? Is it a pricing? Is it pricing? Is it contract details that need to be amended? Is it some deliverable that we need to explain? Do we need to bring a partner in whatever it is? Because most reps, unfortunately operate in a, in a vacuum, they operate alone. So as a CRO, as a founder, as an agency owner, what have you, whoever is responsible for revenue, you ask your people or yourself, if you're running the sales yourself, what are realistically the deals that we're going to, that we're going to close, or we want to close for that quarter and then make an action plan per deal. What needs to get done on the customer side. And specifically for my friends in SaaS or any multi-departmental structure, as a manager, make sure that you involve whichever departments needs to chime in to push that deal forward. Do they need to speak to product to get the roadmap structure for Q1? You bring either a developer or your CTO or whoever you want to bring in to instill confidence in that customer that they can move forward. Do you need to engage legally within the next two weeks to do contract changes? We can't leave that stuff for a month or whenever they have time or whenever the technical team has time or whenever legal has time. No, you need to own the process and drag them in by the hand if you have to. Do you need to, as a manager, do you need to join meetings with them to help the closing negotiation? So put action items, what needs to get done in each deal, delegate these items to whoever in these organizations can take care of them for the shortest amount of time. And from there, hold a weekly meeting separate from the deal clinic and keep your stakeholders accountable. So we said for legal, as an example, we said we're going to do the changes in this customer's contract. Is it done? Give me an, and we need an SLA. It needs to get done by that date. So keep everyone in the organization accountable. If it is, if you are like a lot of our customers are a founder or you're running a startup, a founder-led sales motion as an example, do the same. Go to your investors, go to your board, go to your partners and say, if you want your ROI, these are the deals I'm working with. Let's pull those stops now. If you know anyone that knows anyone that knows anyone, pull your phones out, pull your phones out, pull your phones out, pull your notebooks and your Rolodex for the people that are as old as I am. See who you know, see how we can push things forward because it is really an all hands on deck effort because we can't talk about referrals now in November. We want to talk about, so I know that you have a deal with my father. This is a really good friend of mine. Where are you guys at? What are you guys doing? It's been two months. Like, where are we? For all of them to, to help push things forward. The second thing that I want to mention and rather before I finish that point, if your CRO or your founder or whoever it is that is responsible, it doesn't do that. Do it yourself. Put the Excel yourself, put the Excel together yourself, send it to your team and say, look, if you want me to meet my targets, these are the 10 deals that I have. These are the 10 things that need to get done. This is why, when they need to get them be done by and then push responsibilities. Like I didn't do all I can help me out here. The second thing where I think a lot of us suffer or a lot of people suffer, both founders and individual contributors and managers is that we, we are too stuck into process. So first meeting follow up, then they ghosted me. I see in so many CRMs. I've been ghosted. I've been, the prospect is not responsive or they haven't answered my pricing, whatever it might be. And usually we have a playbook on how to manage these things and we go step by step and it's all very boring and very ineffective. So when we are where we are, and also in general, in whatever step of the process or whatever step of your career you are, get creative. Think completely outside of the box, which is intentional. And also unintentional plug to the company. Uh, think completely outside of the box, go visit them. I remember I had the deal, just a quick story time. I had a deal in Norway. It was stalling for my quarter. I haven't heard from them for two weeks, which is to me, it's too long to not hear back from a prospect. So what I did is I booked tickets. I went to Oslo. I called them up. It's like, yeah, you know what? I happened to be in the area. Do you mind if I come up and we have lunch? They were super surprised because I was in another country. I said, yeah, of course, since you're here, come off. Uh, I discovered two blockers because it was also November in that chat. It wasn't an official business meeting. Even, uh, the Friday I went over on Tuesday, the Friday of that week, we signed. So get creative in any capacity when it comes to, uh, and, and for, for the love of God, call your prospects when they're stolen. Don't email them. Don't LinkedIn them. Don't do targeted ads in November. Pick up the phone, call them, ask them where they are. And for instance, do they have budget leftover? Because there are companies that have budget leftover. If it's not used next year, they're not going to have access to the same amount. Ask them why they're stalling on a pricing perspective. Is it because they don't have budget this quarter, but they can have budget in January? In which case you can be flexible with your contracting terms as an example, uh, and essentially invoice them in January. Instead, there are a lot of things we can do, but we need to have transparent conversations. We need to be open and we need to get as creative as we can. Um, yeah, that is, uh, that is my two cents on the topic. I think I see, we have a couple of questions here. Anyone wants to add to the rant that they, or ask anything on the rant that I just went through, Sarah, go ahead. Yeah. So I want to add to this because one of the things, when we talk about being creative, we talk about this a lot with our customers and I have done a lot of creative stuff in my career when I've been an individual contributor, but also with my team. One of the things that we can see when we sit with customers doing these deal trainings that I was referring to before is that they don't know what creative means. They have never done the exercise. So there are a million, uh, aspects or modules in the deal that you can get creative with. We're talking contract terms. We're talking invoice terms. We're talking contract time. We're talking how to split budget. We're talking about getting budget from other places than their actual budget. We're talking about getting creative with onboarding sessions, amount of onboarding sessions, costs for onboarding. Like there are a million different moving parts that we can talk about and Twitch. But of course we need to know before we go into that conversation that this is the last thing before we can move forward. So we need to have those conversations and we need to say, so if these three things can be amended, are we good to go? Or do we have like the legal process we need to go through? Do we have compliance to go through? What do we need to do? And when we leave the second or third meeting, these things needs to be in our deck, knowledgeable to us, seen by us. Otherwise this becomes super tricky. So that was just the thing I wanted to sort about. Another thing, we have two questions. So let's start with the first one from Peter. So how do you optimize sales pitches? Anyone who feels like they want to grab this one? Thibaut, Mafalda? I have a follow-up question. Which kind of pitch in which situation? Yeah, I, you know, just it's on the cold call, on a conference while speaking to the, you know, already on a sales call. Because I think it depends where in the I know, I think the speakers here would be different to answer the question, at least on my side. I can make an assumption because the next question is, how can you share a few closing techniques? So let's assume that this is in the sales process and Peter can write if it's incorrect. Let's assume that it's in the sales process and we're trying on a sales video call. So in the discovery or in the second meeting. So we're in the sales process, right? Do you want to take it then, Mafalda? No, then it's your jurisdiction because I'm top of funnel. Right. So if it's discovery and demo, I could add my sense, but I think you're more expert than me on that. Okay, I can jump in. So when it comes to optimizing sales pitches, we have two parts. One part is if you're leading a team, how do you optimize their sales pitches, right? The other question is if you're an individual contributor, because there are things that your leader should be doing, but if they're not, you need to do them, right? So optimizing sales pitches has to do with actually recording and reviewing your material. It has to do with tech stack so that you have platforms. That help you understand what happens in the process. But I would, what I have done since we started recording meetings and calls is to list it back to recordings because you find details in those recordings that you can fine tune over and over again. I remember 2012, I had a competition with one of my other sales reps that I was in the same level as we were working both. And we were doing this with the targets on only per month. So it was a competition between him and me. And I, we did a competition. And where we, the question that the competition was, let's see how many wide questions we can ask in a conversation in a discovery meeting. And I asked 47 wide questions. He asked 30. So these are things that have to do with sales hygienics, where we can really push ourselves if we know what to improve. But optimizing that is requires data points. It requires us to record or to go through pipeline to understand where we're sort of missing out. George, you're raising your hand. Go ahead. Yeah, I want to, I want to answer this one because I like the pitch questions. So I think that optimizing a sales pitch is, it's a matter of mentality for me. We should stop thinking about it as a pitch altogether. So when you call a person, when you're in a video call, A, if you want to optimize, if you want to optimize in general, you need to optimize per customer or you need to optimize per ICP. Ideally, you optimize on the fly per individual. The reason, the way to do that is A, make sure you talk a lot less than they talk. So before you pitch anything at all is to understand as much as you can about your customer, where they are, what their pains are. And for me, more importantly, why are they sitting in the call with you? And I don't mean their company. Why is their company sitting in the call with you? Why is that? Why is Mafalda in a call with me? Why, what is he trying to achieve? Not her team, not her company, not the organization, not the group, her, herself. From a career perspective, from a personal perspective, what is the value of what I'm doing? How can I help? And how can I help that individual in particular? Not your ICP, not your buyer persona, the person in the other end of the call. If you ask them and you ask them enough, they will tell you how to optimize. In the call, they will tell you what is important to them. If you continue doing that, you will end up with a pitch that works more often than not on its own. But you will also pinpoint and understand which questions should I ask in order to reach the level of, to Sarah's point, to have data enough to be able to position whatever it is. That's what we're trying to offer. Today, just to jump here, today I saw really good advice on LinkedIn, which was asking AI, whether it's chat GPT or perplexity, what's the hidden objection on the email I wrote? So that's definitely something I'm going to try tomorrow. So when I write an email, a prospecting email, what's the hidden objection from my target persona? And I think that would help me write a better one to overcome the objection already. And I think that also applies to the pitches here or the sales calls. Again, we should use a transcript no matter what. And you have a lot of great tools and many of them are even free. But definitely you can run the analysis on AI with a transcript as well if you don't have a manager who listens to the call. Because that happens. That was actually one of the issues that my previous company solved is managers don't have time to listen to calls, unfortunately. That's wrong, but that's another topic. So they don't listen to your calls. They send them a call to review. It takes them two weeks to review. And then when they finally, it's not relevant anymore or not so much. So it's hard to pull resources. It really is. Because usually people are really underwater or all of us are overworked. And a lot of people don't understand priorities. So you have these two issues. So I really would say that even though it's great to have and you should have feedback from your best sales rep, from your sales engineer. Sales engineers are amazing source of knowledge. From your manager. If in worst case scenario, you can't count on any of them, you can still count on technology, especially nowadays. So definitely leverage that on your favor. Thibaut, any thoughts on optimization or closing techniques? Yeah, on the closing. One thing that actually I got from a friend who used to work in B2B sales, selling enterprise that moved to trading. So he was trading. I don't know exactly what he was, but I think some CO2 certificates or something like that. In trading, you know, you're trading commodity and your obsession is to close today. And so for me, that's really one thing when you are in negotiation or closing is what can you do to get this sign today? So a time kill all deals. That's the case for everything. So what's preventing you from making a decision right now and signing today? And that's a legitimate question to ask when you're, you know, in the late stage. What can we do to get it done by today? And so often, you know, there's basically no reason for waiting. So sometimes you have legal, whatever, but it's just like, you know, there's like thresholds or I don't know if you, everything that goes less than 20K doesn't go through legal. And then, you know, you have something. That's a 22K, get it at 19. You know, it's better to have it now than like the hope of having it tomorrow. And so that's really something that's important to keep in mind is, you know, try to get things done really quickly. And so for me, that's always, that's the way I like doing deals is I have pricing and everything, but I say, okay, if you close it today, I can, you know, we can do this now, but you have to do it today and make this decision. And so that's really also a test because then you see people have the decision-making power. And that helps. And if the business or the person needs to work with you or really wants to solve the problem they want to solve with your solution, you know, they're going to do it at some point. So why not today? Brilliant. Yeah. No, I mean, it's, we in general need to ask a lot more questions and we need to ask a lot more, a lot more transparent and personal questions, not personal as where their kids go to school, but personal as tailored to the person we're talking about, to talking to in that sense. Brilliant. Thank you all very much. We are closing in to the mark. Actually, we exceeded already with a couple of seconds. I want to try to do this and I'm not sure if I will manage. In the platform, I see, okay, this is the poll results so far. So most of us seem to be somewhere in the middle. So if everything goes to plan, we will make it. A bunch of us are pretty stressed because we're already behind. It's a tough market, right? And there are a few that just got smaller that feel very confident that they're on point already. This is brilliant. I will encourage everyone to ask questions if we can for the next couple of minutes. I'm pretty sure you can find all of us and you will find all of us on LinkedIn. If you want to ask further questions, feel free to reach out. There are always things to do and it's never, it's never too late or it shouldn't be too late. At least mentally to focus all resources and all our energy to rounding things up. Any last words, plugs, info, advice for our panel before we wrap this one up? I just want to mention, I just added the day in the life of a persona on the chat. And the reason is if you don't have time, well, you should make time, but for some reason you don't have time to speak to your customer. If your persona is there, hopefully we'll have time to talk to you. And in the end of the episode, I showed them a prospecting email. So maybe it can give you some, you know, lights why your emails are not converting so much. So definitely that's a very easy, quick win is available on YouTube. No data, no gated content. So feel free and go there. So that's my best advice to close. You're not going to follow them up. No, it's on YouTube. No, no. I have no idea who they are. So go for it. You're not going to hear from me. Good. Good. All right. Anyone else? Yeah, for me, just drop my LinkedIn. Any question, reach out to me there. I have one last thing. Don't wait until Monday for that sales meeting. Do things tomorrow. We don't have time. So go get your reporter. Brilliant. Let's go get, let's go make some money then. Thank you all very much for joining. Reach out to us if you want to ask any further questions. Until next time. See you all out there. Thank you. Have a good one. Bye.