If you’re talking to me about a $30,000 problem, I don’t need to be talking to you about a $10,000 solution. We need be honest about that. And so that was part of our process. Like, look, you know, I don’t want to. I hate to break it to you, but we’re going to tell you like it is.

And and if you can’t accept that, that’s fine. You can look at some other alternatives. But if you can’t accept that, we’ll put some meat on the bone. We’ll, help you understand why it is what it is. But we were going to work from the truth.

This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion, a team of expert consultants that have helped hundreds of growing businesses build scalable systems on the HubSpot and Salesforce platforms. To learn more, visit fastslowmotion.com. Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. I’m your host, Sam Donaghy.

Thanks for joining us for part two of our conversation with sales expert Barry Thomason. If you’re just joining us, Barry is an exceptional sales advisor who works with founders and early stage growth companies. He’s made a significant impact in the fields of sales and marketing throughout his career, and currently holds the position of Entrepreneur in Residence at the New Venture Accelerator and Harvard College of Business at Auburn University.

He’s also no stranger to a Fast Slow Motion because he played a pivotal role in helping to build the company for eight and a half years, and has since retired in December 2022. All right, Barry, let’s dive back into our conversation. So we’ve talked about processes earlier. So how does the business go about figuring out the right processes for them?

Yeah. Well, you know, not to beat a dead horse, but. Right. First thing is kind of think through the buyer. What what do they typically do in our, in our market or our industry or whatever the end product services across most industries. Buyers kind of do the same stuff, particularly when they’re in the decision process, trying to decide what to do and who to do that with.

Now the transaction part of the deal, paperwork and all that, that can vary a lot, but that stuff’s pretty easy. Keep it in a buyer’s context. And then maybe a good place to start is to look at your sales pipeline. First thing is, is you should have well defined entry criteria for when a deal goes into the pipeline.

I’ve met a lot of companies before them tell you that everybody’s a prospect, and yet they put everything in the pipeline, and then they wonder if other pipelines all It’s a big mess. It’s got a whole bunch of stuff. And it never moves. Nobody pays it any attention. Right. So define what a deal even is before it goes in there.

And then the next thing you know, and I always do this if I, if somebody engages me to like, hey, help us with our sales process, I’m going to look at their pipeline stages. Well, I want to see if there’s too many. You know, I’ve seen people with 15 sales stages in CRM. What do you doing? I’ve struggled to have more 5 or 6 ever that were that were realistic and matched to the buyer.

So, you know, reconcile your, you know, your pipeline stages. But the most critical thing is, is that every stage in your pipeline should have a defined exit criteria, and it’s objectively observable. So and it’s observable but based on what the buyer is doing. So you can’t as a seller you can’t move a deal without corresponding action from the buyer.

So an example would be if I had Fast Slow Motion when we were in our proposal stage, we couldn’t move from the proposal stage to the next stage until we had a meeting with the prospect and reviewed the proposal in person. If we didn’t have that meeting, that’s valuable information, right? If, if if you want me to solve your problem and then you won’t give me time to meet, review my solution.

I’m not moving you to the next stage because you’re not looking like a very good prospect at that moment. When you have when you have sales stages which you can move between without the buyer doing anything. You’re just asking for trouble. Because I can, you know, if I’ve got a meeting coming up with my boss, I’m going to look at my pipeline, just move a few deals, right?

Like in Fast Slow Motion’s case, every stage gets moved based on something the buyer has to do it. We’ve talked a lot about the buyer’s journey, so can you share some examples? You know, best practices of successful sales processes that do align with the buyer’s journey? Yeah, I think, a good example is probably the Fast Slow Motion example, right.

So, you know, we got started, John and myself, you know, we had dealt with enterprise level clients in the I.T. space, and we wanted to bring that level of service and quality to small businesses because we love small businesses. Right. And we felt like they deserved it. We felt like we could make a market in that. But one of the challenges about the small business market was many of our, the Fast Slow Motion clients.

It’s probably still so today. They had never evaluated not only not a professional services firm, but also probably not even any technology beyond maybe when they bought QuickBooks, right? They didn’t even they didn’t really have systems, so they didn’t really know what they needed to do to make a good evaluation. And so we made that part of our we kind of built our process around to look, if we were you, this is how we’d do it.

These are the steps. And most of them not having anything on their own, they say, well, okay, that makes sense to us right. And but it it started from the, the mindset of and John again this has come from the top down John was a was 100% on board with this is that we wanted to provide everybody that we encountered with value whether they did business with us or not.

So that that’s the kind of the mindset that we were working from, right, is, you know, we’re service for about our business is a service, service company. We start provide service the second we pick up the phone the first time we ever talk, right. So, you know, the first thing we did is, you know, we made it our business.

We were going to be hyper responsive both to our partner reps like Salesforce AEs and to to the prospects. So we just kind of joke about it. If somebody goes to the fastsolution.com fills out the contact us form, we kind of had a little unwritten rule that, you know, if you if you weren’t in a meeting, you need to call within an hour, not an email back. Say, hey, we got your message. Call them. It freaked a lot of people out. And like, what did you expect? Just ask us to contact you. We’re interested. Right? So we want to kind of set that set that tone right off the bat. And if we couldn’t call you right away, would email you right away, say we’re busy right now.

You hear from us by the end of the day. Better believe you heard from us by the end of the day, right? We’re interested, and you can trust us. We said we’re going to do something, and we did it. We wanted to do deep discovery. We wanted to gloss over. You know it. We didn’t have to confine it to a one hour call. We were trying to figure out, okay, what is what are these people trying to solve for? What’s their situation look like? What are the risks? Those kind of things. Right. So we go as deep as we need it to go. We bring, you know, higher level consultants in for that if we needed to. But we were going to give you a first class assessment of kind of the current situation and get the information we needed to present you with a good plan.

Once we did that, we would socialize realistic cost and estimates. This is a big trap for a lot of salespeople is they’ll try to lowball because they’re scared they’re going to run the deal off. Our model was built to run the deal off if the deal was unrealistic. So if you’re talking to me about a $30,000 problem, I don’t need to be talking to you about a $10,000 solution.

We need be honest about that. And so that was that was part of our process. Like, I hate to break it to you, but we’re going to tell you like it is. And and if you can’t accept that, that’s fine. You can look at some other alternatives. But if you if you can’t accept that, we’ll, we’ll put some meat on the bone. We’ll, we’ll help you understand why it is what it is. But we were going to work from the truth, whether anybody liked it or not, right. Another thing we did this very valuable is, is so, you know, technically, the customer is always right, except that they’re not. You know, we challenged people’s thinking. And because a lot of times we’d be looking at a, at a process that was implemented in one way, and they had more of a process problem than a system problem. And you just had, you know, you had to call these things out. And you and you have to point out risk where you see them. And there’s a lot of value in there. If, if, if you ask us to automate a process that’s a bad process, you just going to have an automated bad process, right? And so I mean we and we would draw the line on that.

Right. If we got into those kind of situations. And the deal was like, you know, you have to implement this way. We’re like, well, the way you’re telling us to implement, we’re telling you it won’t work. It might work on day one, but 100 days in, it’ll come apart. You know, which, you know, you have to get somebody else because we’re not in the failure business, right?

So. So again, we’re just open and honest. We’re not mean, but we got a lot of experience. You’re talking to us because you don’t know this is what you need to think about, right? So we we go through all that. We try to point out blind spots. That’s gold when you can you help somebody not get run over by a truck from behind. Right. It’s you know, they may give you a list of things that they think are their problems. And you may go through those and you say, well, what about these 2 or 3 things? And they’re like, never crossed my mind. You know that when you get into that, you know that area, then you know the proactiveness of the buyer really, really increases, right?

Because you bring in value to the table that others are doing. So that was a very important part of our process. Then, as I said a minute ago, we presented our solutions. We did mailing it in. I’ll spend the time on a proposal, but you go and spend a time heard about it and if you I don’t want you to get if you get sticker shock, I want to be right there on the phone with you so we can talk through it.

Right. Those kind of things. And I want to answer your questions and what you do, you know, give it to me straight, work through it. So, and then the final thing in our process was, is we were we were, we spent a lot of time on, you know, in professional services sales. Ultimately, all you’re doing is making a promise. You say you give me a certain amount of money, a certain amount of time, we’re going to deliver a thing. And every other competitors doing the same thing, they’re all making promises. And so we spent a lot of energy and we we would just tell prospects that, like, look, we’ve made a lot of promises. You’ve got promises from other people.

Let’s talk about how we’re going to make them come true. And then, you know, we would go through our delivery process in some detail so they’d know what to expect on day one, because if we don’t tell them what to expect, they’re going to create their own expectations in reality, and it’s not going to be right. And so what we what we ended up end up with our sales prospect.

We’ve got a quality deal. We got a realistic client and they know what’s coming next. And then we have, as you know, Fast Slow Motion has a really good sales to delivery transition process that on the kickoff call, the stuff that the seller, our seller said was going to happen starts happening and everybody feels a whole lot better at that point.

Right. Oh okay. Yeah. They said they were going to do this and they did. I know they said they’re going to do that and they did it just you know, that’s strips all the risk away from the from the client’s perspective. And people can they just just get down to business and work together and trust each other. So that’s kind of how we built it.

And you know, it worked out really well, I love that. What a fantastic breakdown. And I’ve never actually heard it be said in such detail. So thank you so much for that Barry, when I look out to the market, definitely not an expert, but it seems like customers are becoming increasingly more empowered, right, with the internet at their fingertips.

So, you know, the buyer can, you know, research every service and product out there now and they can make decisions with or without a salesperson. I think you alluded to this before as well. So how can businesses these days ensure that sales processes are adaptable and responsive but to changing market conditions and customer needs? Yeah, it’s you know that you hear that a lot these days about how it’s all different now because of the internet.

Well, it’s not it is, but it’s not. Right. The interesting thing is what the buyer is doing is the same stuff they were doing in 1985 when I started. Now they’re doing part of it differently, using different tools. Whereas, you know, when I first started, if you needed information, you usually kind of had to go find a sales rep because we had the information and now you get the information, you know, from Google, right?

But again, the work is still the same. The buyer is still going through those same stages. It’s just a question of, okay, what tools do I leverage or what techniques to I leverage when I align with the buyer to help them move along? Right. So, and a lot of it really gets down to because the buyer now has so much information, they may not understand what they think they know.

So they’re they’re inundated with a bunch of information. And then what what you become as a seller in the in the modern world, you’re kind of a curator. Like, you got to cut through all that noise and get down to the essence of, you know, what is it we’re trying to do here and what will work and what won’t work? And, again, our our Fast Slow Motion sales process, you know, process functions great in this environment. And but it’s not really any different than it would have functioned probably 25 years ago. So is it a combination of all the things that you’ve mentioned that sets a good sales team apart from the next? Yeah, that’s a that’s a good way to put it.

Right. It’s, it’s but if you if you had to just get it down to one thing right, it’s like, you know, good sales team knows how to, you know, understand where their buyer is in their journey and understand you know, what to do it once they figure it out. Okay. This is where they are. This is what I need to be doing to help them move.

That’s the work. It’s funny. You you you hear some salespeople still referred to as closers. I want to get closers. Right? Most of the deals in my life that have closed, there’s no magic where you’re going to ask this big closing question and be quiet. And I was trained back in the day, you know, your hand of the pen and the next person who speaks loses and stuff like that.

You know, if you do the work, more often than not, the prospect will say something like, what do we need to do to get this going? He’s like, oh, I didn’t, I didn’t get to do I didn’t get to do my big close man. So, you know, you just get in there with the buyer. They’re trying to do something, get in there and help them.

And then and it’ll mesh and it’ll and it’ll close. Barry, it’s been fantastic. to be chatting with you today. So thank you so much for your time. And, you know, we always like to wrap up each episode with a quote that really encompasses what we’ve been discussing in the episode. So do you have a quote that you’d like to share with us today?

Yeah, I guess I guess as long as it can be a quote from me, right? I don’t have one like from Voltaire or anything like that. But, you know, I’ll just say, just remember that sales takes place inside of a somebody else’s buying process to to. Right. Don’t forget that. It’s it, it’s it’s kind of like a zipping up a zipper.

Right. If you if you get the little thingy in there. Right. And it’s aligned it’ll zip right up. Right. If it gets, if it gets stuck, something’s not in alignment. The same thing is true. Like your sales pipeline, right? So understand the buyer, get where they are, serve them, and the zipper will zip right up, and you’ll get deals.

And if you get stuck back up, you missed something. I love it. I’ve got to say, that’s probably my favorite quote. Now, Barry, of all the quotes on on all of the episodes so far. So thank you so much for being here today, Barry. Thank you Sam. Enjoyed every minute of it. Well, that’s it for today’s episode.

Thanks again, Barry, for joining us. For our listeners, we hope that Barry’s insights into why it’s so important to reframe the sales process as a service for the buyer, or helpful to you as you work to build a successful business. Remember to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform or you can find archived episodes at fastslowmotion.com/podcast.