The #1 reason your deals stall

Today I’m going to share a story that happened to me yesterday during a coaching call with three founders. We were discussing what were the best ways to actually move the deal faster, get some commitment and engagement, because very often, what they were facing is people were interested, thought things were exciting, but nothing moved further for them. And so often, they were just using that as an excuse to get rid of them.

And so what we found out is actually the thing that you need to do whenever you are selling to anyone, should it be a champion, a decision maker, or simply anyone, is to find the one metric in their job that will get them promoted or get them fired. That’s the idea. So everyone has metrics in their jobs on the way they are evaluated, such in sales, for example.

It will be] the number of opportunities you will generate if you’re in SDR or BDR or a number of these will close or not will close. And these are very clear, very simple metrics you can actually see. If you crush it, you’re going to get promoted, you’re going to get more money. If you actually keep failing quarter after quarter, you’re going to get fired at some point.

And so that’s exactly the same for any kind of job. People have metrics, things that are measured to see if they will actually get promoted or get fired. And so your job is to find out what is this metric? And whenever you do that, whenever you understand what’s the metric where people are at and where they want it to be, you’ll be able to actually convince them way more to take action and move something to close that.

A quick example for that, if you watch Netflix and have Netflix, you should watch a series called Ozark. And in this series, there’s a very interesting scene at one moment where the main character, Marty, who’s actually doing money laundering and has to find ways to launder money. What he’s doing is simply, he’s convincing a family of farmers who are actually simply cultivating poppies, so this is opium. He’s convincing them to actually build a casino on their land so they will make 10, 100 X what they’re making already.

And so what he finds is that the metric that matters for them is money. So they always want to make more money and if they can make 10X, 100X, that, they will actually take the pain of building a casino on their land. And so that’s exactly the same there. It’s like, he finds what’s matter for them. It’s money, cash, and then he gets that from one point to the other and he sells the vision, the outcome they will have.

So think about how you can do something similar. For a lot of people, money is not the main drive. Promotions, prestige, these kind of things can be a main drive. And once you have that, you can start selling the vision and how you’re going to bring them there. So try this in your day to day, in your next calls. Try to find out what’s the metric that get people fired or promoted. It’s going to make your life much easier and it’s going to close the deal faster.