you get on this meeting and you've had a good conversation with, let's say, a director of sales, and you understand the day-to pain that they're struggling with, and you're like, Zoom info is pretty well equipped to help with this. You talked about wanting to elevate the conversation. My guess is VP of Sales or CRO joins. There's specific things that you're doing to make sure that you're not just talking in the same language that you talked about with the director. When you're meeting with that executive for the first time, what are you doing in the beginning of the meeting, whether it's the way that you set the agenda or the way that you recap what you learned before to elevate said conversation?

before that call starts, at the end of that first call, I am going to try to understand, like, you know, what are you guys talking about in internal meetings? You know, when you have your sales kickoffs, your weekly meetings, your team meetings, your QBRs, whatever sort of you have internally, help provide some color around what the discussion is like. What are those top initiatives, right? Like, I know what our goals are from the CEO on down. And so do you guys have something along those lines? And then that way, I can start to build zoom info story into their language and tie it directly to those goals. What I'm also going to do is before that call takes place, I'm going to do some more pre call research. So I'm going to like review earnings calls, if they're a large publicly traded company, to find out what their CEO CRO is talking about for growth expectations. I'm going to look at their company websites and I'm going to look at like what are they hiring for? Are they hiring for marketing roles, sales roles, you know, the things that I care about because that indicates growth. I'm going to look at their case studies and I'm going to look at like who the individual was that gave the case study. what are the key takeaways that that person talked about and where that particular company's solution helped their customers? Because then my demo, my conversation is all going to, again, be put into sort of that language.

I really like the question, what are you talking about in internal meetings? And the reason for that is, I think oftentimes prospects feel like they need to play the role of translator of, hey, we know what the business needs, but let me translate it for the sales person and tell them what we're looking for. And that's oftentimes why what you described earlier, they come to you and they say, we want this. And you have to go and figure out what's motivating that want. The internal meetings question says, Hey, I actually don't need you to translate for me what the cost, the priorities are. Just tell me what you're talking about because I can infer then where the real need is. I really like the language in that question.

So let's move to that second call. How do you structure a second sales call? Yeah, structuring

a second sales call is going to be, you're starting to work your way up in the organization and you want to view those people, they're going to want to hopefully view you as an equal. So this is where you need to show, I have been here, I speak your language, the next 30 minutes that we're going to be spending together is going to be worth your time. The other reason for that is like the person that you spoke to originally and then brought their higher up, their peers in, they're expending political capital internally to bring this meeting together. So you want to make that person look good. Like the last thing you want to do is have that meeting finish and then be like, Steve, why, why did you bring me to this meeting? That was a total waste of time, right? Like you want to be leaving that meeting feeling like, Steve, that was incredible. Thank you so much for bringing this to me. So you're going to take all of those things that you uncovered on the first call. You know, the questions that you asked and sort of that plan component, you're going to put together hopefully an ideally a custom deck that sort of brings together those bullet points. You're going to bring together customer stories, case study, story, video, something along those lines of their peer set. And you're going to architect that meeting along that whole storyline. So it's going to sound like, Hey, Armin's, you know, Nick, we had a great first meeting, and he talked about A, B and C. So it might be like his struggle to find great fit accounts, the challenge of people getting to respond to him. And then ultimately that translates itself across your 20 sellers of misproductivity, sales missing numbers, growth getting harder to accomplish. So in the next 30 minutes, we're going to talk through how we've done what Nick told me for widget Corp and what their CRO saw as a result. Before we do that, is there anything that I missed? Is there anything that you're thinking about that I didn't touch on? And then you're going to get their need if you didn't. And if you did, great, because it's going to show Armin that you really did your homework. Nick set this thing up, and it's going to be super valuable for you as

the leader. mistake that most sellers make is They do a great discovery call. They find all these problems Someone new gets onto the second call they start discovery all over again and what this does is it? Frustrates your champion because your champion has gone through this entire process and they're like, why did we even do the first discovery call? They want to get to the action but the opposite situation is just as bad, which is you hear all this stuff from your champion, and you assume that everyone else agrees. So you just jump right into a demo for the second meeting. You need a mix of both, you need to come in and present what you found already, but then let the next person wrap another layer. So you show you gather a little bit more, and then you continue to present. and as you get later and later in the sales cycle, you move farther away from inquiring for 80% of the call and closer to presenting when you get into things like proposals, but still there's a constant iteration of discovery that adds on the original things that you've learned in that first discovery call.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, today's buying groups have expanded a lot like five people involved, eight people involved, 15 people involved. And so you are going to be hopefully bringing those people in. And so you need to at every step show, okay, I can help this individual, I can help that individual, I can help that individual. And everybody feels like their needs are being met. Because the last thing you want is when they sit around in that buying committee, and they're talking behind your back about you and your product and your seller as a solution, is to say like, all of a sudden you have these voices of like, well, it only helps Nick, right? It only helps Armand and it doesn't help me because we just made too many assumptions. You want everybody coming to the table of saying yes, this helps me in this way. Yes, this helps me in this way. Yes, this helps me in that way. We'd be silly not to do this. We can solve all of these.