Pre-Call Planning

21 minutes
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Updated August 22, 2022
Founding Sales

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Did you know your presentation starts before you even get on the call or show up at the prospect’s office? Just as professional athletes use scouting reports and watch previous game recordings to maximize their performance on game day, the best sales staff rigorously prep for their demos and presentations to ensure they make the most out of them.

If you consider the time and energy that went into putting the demo in question on the calendar, you might think, “How could you not prep for something like that?” Well, you’d be shocked by the preparation laziness demonstrated by a lot of sales staff. Don’t be that person. You or your market development rep helper spent hundreds of dollars of salary expense to get this demo on the calendar. Don’t set that work on fire. Further, this is about raising your win rate and making the most of this opportunity. What’s your average contract value? ~$20K? If proper preparation can raise your win rate from 15% to 25%, well, you just made ~$2K with 15 minutes of preparatory work. Pre-call planning is not optional.

Note that presentation preparation is not the same as prepping for cold calling—which is usually a waste of time. Because connect rates on cold calls are fairly low, spending five minutes to get all the context about an account into your head before you dial means that you’re just reducing the number of calls that you can make, for no particular benefit. However, because hold rates on demos should be 80% or higher, you know there’s at least an 80% chance you’re going to be having a serious commercial conversation that could result in ~$20K (or whatever your ACV is). It’s worth the time investment.

Calendar Management

The best way to make sure you don’t skip pre-call planning is to put it on the calendar. When you send a meeting invite to a prospect for the presentation, put an additional 15-minute block on your own calendar just ahead of the meeting. This way you won’t accidentally put another meeting back to back with your presentation, jamming future-you up, and you’ll have a calendar reminder to make sure you do your pre-call planning.

importantIf you’re doing outside sales, you’ll typically need to block that time on your calendar for travel time, as well. You want to book the travel time to precede your pre-call planning. Whatever the travel time will be, book that on your calendar so that you arrive 30 minutes ahead of your designated appointment. It will most certainly take 5–10 minutes for you to check in with reception, reception to contact your prospect, and the prospect to pick you up at reception. Target checking in with reception 15 minutes before your appointment, and arrive at your destination 15 minutes before that to adequately prepare for your meeting so everything is fresh in your head.

The goal of pre-call planning is to ensure that you have readily accessible, ideally in your brain, all the relevant information that you sniffed out ahead of time, and a list of known unknowns for you to figure out during discovery, the first part of your presentation. Much of this information you’ll remember from your prospecting activities, like outward signifiers of demand, relevant points of contact and influencers, and so forth. The goal is to stack the information advantage in your favor, so you know which questions to ask and which to skip. And if the prospect tries to introduce information that isn’t 100% true, you’ll know. It’s your job to control the call, and more information makes that more achievable.

Take another look at Early Prospecting for greater detail on how to gather this information. To refresh your memory, those are the different types of details you’ll want to make sure you have front and center before you hop onto your demo.

Pain Points and the Size of the Prize

These are the outwardly identifiable characteristics that indicated that the prospect had a need for your solution. For TalentBin, this could be open technical hires. For Immediately, it could be the number of field sales reps needing a sales-centric mobile email and CRM client. And for Textio, it could be the number of open job postings that need to be optimized. Knowing these pain signifiers will help you with your proactive ROI understanding. If you’re HIRABL, the staffing agency revenue-acceleration company, and you know that your solutions on average add ~$10K per recruiter per year in added revenue, then knowing how many recruiters there are in the agency you’re going to talk to (30! 50! more!) will help you proactively position that benefit in your presentation.

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You’ll also want to know how much you can potentially sell, known as “size of prize.” You won’t be trying to sell just one seat of your solution, or some other minimum amount. Rather, you need to know how much of your solution the organization could potentially consume. This might be correlated to the potential number of users (like number of sales reps or recruiters or support reps) or some other characteristic specific to your prospect.

This doesn’t mean you’re going to eat the whole apple in one bite. In fact, selling a young solution across an entire organization—like selling 100 seats of TalentBin to a recruiting organization when we were a ten-person company—can be a dicey proposition. However, knowing how much could be sold, so you can properly guide the conversation, is a benefit.

example“Well, I know you have ten recruiters, and from what I saw, Jeff, Suzy, and Julie are the ones that focus on technical hiring, so perhaps three seats would be appropriate.”

Having this information available can help you determine what would be a good outcome from a first-sale standpoint.

There’s 14 recruiters at New Relic. Maybe we can sell them five seats to start?

Figure: Using LinkedIn to Deduce Size of Prize

Source: LinkedIn

Complementary Products, Competitive Products, and Capacity to Pay

You’ll also want to go into your pitch knowing the sort of products the organization has in the mix. Take another look at Early Prospecting for how to use tools like Datanyze and BuiltWith to determine the technologies running on an organization’s website and for where else to look to determine whether they’re paying for premium services. By understanding this ahead of time, you’ll get a sense of how the organization currently solves the problem your solution addresses and if they pay money to do it. And if you are able to sniff out a directly competitive product, not only will you know that the organization cares enough about the problem to spend money on it, you’ll be prepared to explain why your solution is better, faster, and stronger than the one that they’re currently using.

Lastly, understanding an organization’s funding situation can help with the question of their capacity to pay. If an organization has raised ~$100M in funding in the last few months, that money was raised to execute—to hire engineers, buy advertising, or what have you. Same with public companies—if they’re growing their revenue and have a strong balance sheet, they will be more open to solutions that make the business better, compared to an organization that is not only loss-making, but perhaps in decline (as measured by revenue growth).

Potential Users

Use LinkedIn to make sure you know who the potential users of your solution would be. You’ll already have done this to determine size of prize, but it will also help if you are speaking with a decision-maker different from the end user. Knowing your potential users can help if you get into discussions about who would be the most relevant person to use or even evaluate the solution. TalentBin needed to be careful that an inattentive decision-maker didn’t ask a nontechnical recruiter to take a demo to evaluate our solution.

Stakeholders and Influencers

Ideally your demo is with the relevant decision-maker, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other stakeholders in the problem your solution solves—the decision-maker’s boss, for example, or her internal customers. Or if somehow you entered through one of those internal customers, you’ll want to know whom you ultimately need to talk to after that first meeting. Same is true if you are entering through a level below the decision-maker.

Not only will this allow you to demonstrate organizational mastery and diligence, but it provides a “credible threat” (not stated, but mildly implied) that you have awareness of other people in the organization and likely would not have any issue getting access to them. So, if you’re Immediately, and you’re talking to a Sales Operations decision-maker, it’s helpful to know who the VP of Sales is (say, Christina), as she’s ultimately on the hook for the organization’s revenue achievement and personally stands to make more money with increased revenues—as in, “And you can imagine how happy Christina will be knowing that the field reps you work with will be closing more business in less time because they’re not stuck in coffee shops updating Salesforce!”

Of course, this goes all the way up to the CEO, who has an interest in the downstream impacts of your solution. If you’re talking about a solution to assist with sales hiring, you know that private and public organizations are valued at a multiple of their revenues. So faster sales hiring, with better hires, and faster onboarding can get an organization to higher revenue levels faster—which could allow a private organization to raise their next round of funding at a higher valuation. Or if the organization is public with, say, a price-to-earnings ratio of 15, and your ROI analysis indicates that your solution will save them ~$1M a year, you’re looking at adding ~$15M of market capitalization to the organization through the implementation of your solution. Now, depending on the size of the company, this strategy may be more or less relevant. But at a medium or smaller organization, say 500 people or fewer, this is certainly something a CEO would be interested in. Knowing who that is, so you can demonstrate to your point of contact why they would care and how you could potentially deliver that message, will make your case stronger.

Same if you are entering the account a level below your intended decision-maker target. Characterizing to that staffer that you’re well aware of who the relevant decision-maker is changes his calculus when it comes to next steps. You can indicate that the staffer has an opportunity to be the bringer of innovation and excellence to his boss—or, if he chooses not to, that you’ll likely just engage directly with the decision-maker, potentially making the staffer look like someone who missed an opportunity.

example“You can imagine how excited Kieran will be knowing that she can save each of her recruiters ten hours a week. You’ll be a hero!”

In this case, your point of contact can help you with Kieran, or look to be behind the eight ball. It’s clear to me which one sounds better!

Customization Information

As we discussed in Early-Stage Sales Materials Basics, the ability to personalize your presentation and demo for the prospect is paramount. So if there is additional information that you need to gather in order to customize your presentation, do so.

exampleFor TalentBin, this could mean looking at the prospect’s careers site to see which technical openings you’d want to focus your demo on. So rather than asking, “What roles are you having a hard time filling?” the question is instead, “I saw you’re hiring for an iOS developer. That would be a good one for me to use to show you how TalentBin works. Does that work?” Better control.

Or if you’re LifeGuides and want to show how you can help with a problematic Glassdoor presence, you might want to take a screenshot of that Glassdoor page and some choice negative reviews. Or if you’re Affirm, use Google Chrome’s Developer Tools to drop a Pay with Affirm call to action into your e-commerce prospect’s product detail page.

Figure: Pay with Affirm Call to Action on Product Detail Page

Source: Affirm

Look how nice that financing call to action looks there. I bet it raises conversion rates!

Conversational Guides and Icebreakers

importantLastly, while business pain and stakeholder research is paramount from a nuts-and-bolts standpoint, you’ll want to take time to gather conversational guides, icebreakers, and rapport-building information for the first couple minutes of your call. If you think blathering about the weather is going to get this done, you’re really missing out. That’s the limp fallback of someone who doesn’t do his research ahead of time. This is especially important for phone sales. In face-to-face meetings, it’s somehow easier to establish rapport. You have to be intentional about it on the phone, though, so selecting a piece of information you’re going to key off of is all the more valuable.

LinkedIn is fantastic for a couple of reasons. First, you can see if you share any contacts with the prospect that you want to surface proactively. If it’s an existing customer of yours, excellent! You should certainly bring that up. “I saw on LinkedIn that you know Jeff from Dropbox. He’s a customer of ours. Great guy!” But this could be former colleagues or classmates of yours too—most shared contacts are a good opportunity to build rapport—unless the shared contact has a poor opinion of you. In that case, skip this! (Or be prepared for your words to get back to that contact!)

You can also see where else your prospect has worked. Perhaps you overlapped at a prior organization? And, of course, you can check out her educational background, which can be helpful if it’s college football season. Even if she’s not into that sort of thing, if you’re dealing with an Ohio State, Alabama, University of Texas, or USC alum, she’ll probably be at least secondarily aware, and it makes you look thoughtful. You can also check out geography to see where she’s based (not all points of contact are based in the same location as the organization’s headquarters). This can be helpful for local sports teams (“Wow, that Patriots-Steelers game was something, huh?”) or, at worst, local weather (“Wow, you have been hammered by that blizzard, huh?”).

Further, as LinkedIn has pushed users to surface personal interests on their profiles, you can often see if the prospect is into yoga, rock climbing, whatever. Sometimes she’ll have a concurrent role for a side project, like the small business she also owns or a non-profit organization on whose board she sits. All are potentially excellent topics for icebreaking. Beyond LinkedIn, many prospects will have active Twitter accounts, and they’re often a valuable source of recent interests. (Following your prospects on Twitter is a great strategy, in general, and we’ll talk about it more later.)

On the topic of rapport building, stay away from politics, religion, and so on. Even if the prospect is tweeting endlessly about this political candidate or that one, it’s just too dicey. You can find something else to establish rapport with if you try.

Known Unknowns

While you’ll be able to nail down a lot of great information about your prospect ahead of time with 15 minutes of work, you likely won’t be able to find everything you need. This is perfectly fine, as the first part of your sales presentation will be focused on discovery and surfacing this information. However, as you do your pre-call planning and research, you’ll want to note exactly what you weren’t able to find ahead of time, so you can make sure to ask the right questions during discovery.

As you do many of these presentations, your approach will evolve and you’ll eventually form a pre-call planning checklist, along with a discovery question checklist. When you do, capture this information in your CRM. You’ll be having dozens of these presentations, and when you go to follow up with the prospect, much of the pre-call research is reusable. Capturing it in its distilled form saves you time. Better yet, you’ll be creating a piece of tooling for the sales reps you eventually hire to scale your activities.

Stated Pitch Goal

Once you have all of this information, you should be able to form a plan and establish your goal for the call. If you’re talking to the right decision-maker, and it’s clear that the account has tons of need for your solution and spends lots of money on analogous products, maybe that goal is to win consideration of a purchase. If you’re talking to someone who is likely not the end practitioner, but is an internal customer and potential sponsor, perhaps the goal is to convince him of the benefit of your solution and partner with him to drive to a second call with the ultimate decision-maker. If you’re coming in below the decision-maker level, maybe it’s to drive to a secondary call with the decision-maker and the rest of the staffer’s team. Whatever the goal, make sure you know what it is. Don’t worry, your call will certainly diverge from plan! But identifying your polestar will help you drive toward it, even as things go sideways.

Pre-Call Attitude

Beyond gathering information and establishing your goal for the call, there’s also the matter of just getting in the zone. A large part of selling is projecting confidence in your solution and your recommendations to the prospect. So prepare yourself accordingly. Stand, walk around, do jumping jacks (probably not in the prospect’s lobby, if you’re on-site!), and get yourself in a positive, and active, frame of mind. I have a standing desk, but even if you don’t, take sales calls standing. You will project more authority and be quicker on your feet.

Pitch Materials and Concepts

Let’s talk about where the rubber meets the road—the actual pitch we’ve been diligently lining up and preparing for!

Tools and Materials

Depending on the location of your pitch, the tooling you’ll employ will change. However, just as you’ve been intentional with respect to your materials and preparations, so too you will be with your tooling.

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