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Unit Summary
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Extra Resources
Unit Summary
What this unit is about
From creating an agenda to running your first meeting with a prospect. We will review the steps to take through the sales cycle. What key objectives you want to have during each meeting and how to prevent “ghosting” in between meetings. How to control the sales process so you don’t waste months chasing bad deals.
Objectives
- How to build credibility “prior” to even showing up to the meeting
- How to motivate busy executives to take and keep the meeting
- What strategy and goals do you have each step of the way.
- How trial closes during each meeting help move shorten the cycle.
Read Transcript
[00:00:01.690] – James Kernan
All right everybody, welcome back. We’re going to go ahead and get started with session three of how to run a prospect’s meeting. And we’re going to really dive into steps three and four of the sales process that we’ve outlined. Let’s go ahead and get started. I got tons of great content for you.
[00:00:18.540] – James Kernan
I’m actually excited about today because I think this will be a difference maker inside your practice. And I’ve got some extra handouts for you as well. So let’s get rolling. So hopefully you all know me or recognize me. James Kernan, current Consulting.
[00:00:34.870] – James Kernan
I’ve been in the industry for about 30 years and started as an MSP business owner the first half of my career, bought, sold, owner, ran seven different tech companies, all primarily out in the state of California. Real successful track record. Sold my last business in 2006 and became a business coach. So here I am. I love doing what I’m doing and giving back to the community and helping people become more successful because I’ve been there, done that, and it’s lonely at the top and sometimes you need some encouragement and sharing of best practices.
[00:01:10.730] – James Kernan
So today’s agenda, I’m going to go through a real quick program overview, just remind you where we’re at in the process. We’re going to dig into session three, which is really sales process. The point of today is obviously this is lead gen and appointment setting, right? But when you get face time with the prospect, I want you to be prepared and know exactly what to say. Okay?
[00:01:34.640] – James Kernan
So when you get there, when you show up at the show and you’re at meeting number one or meeting number two, that’s what we’re going to go through today. So I’ve got some great handouts for you as well. And then we’ll wrap up and hopefully share a couple of questions. So we’re at session three of our five part series, the program objectives. Number one, first and foremost, everything starts with a plan.
[00:01:57.540] – James Kernan
So I gave everybody and already done for you sales playbook for you to customize to your own business. So that’s number one. Number two, appointment setting basics. From a Legion standpoint, that was actually session two. And then how to run the first and second meetings.
[00:02:15.990] – James Kernan
That’s kind of what I’m going to go into today, how to make customers for life. And then how to create presentations that can help you close the deal and increase your chances. We’re going to talk about that. So here we are, sales process, session three. So before I get started, I wanted to make sure that I wanted to find out if anybody had any questions.
[00:02:39.590] – James Kernan
We’ve gone through a ton of content already. Session one was super heavy. Session two, I kind of went through a little bit more of the sales playbook. I had some good questions and conversations with people primarily between week one and week two, but I just wanted to find out, drop into the Q and A section. That’s how we can communicate.
[00:03:02.830] – James Kernan
If you guys have any questions about the homework thus far or anything that you want me to address if you don’t have anything right now, as I’m going through the presentation today, through training, drop into the Q and A section, and I’ll try to answer the questions as we go or for sure at the end. Welcome, David. Happy to have you. No worries. We’ve got the trainings recorded and all the handouts, so be aware there are several handouts in most all of the classes, including today.
[00:03:33.260] – James Kernan
So there we go. All right, cool. Thank you. So something I wanted to share with you, the art of being a great salesperson is really the ability to communicate properly. And when I talk about communication, primarily it’s public speaking.
[00:03:51.900] – James Kernan
It’s getting up in front of a room of people and speaking confidently about what you do. Number one, it’s important as a leader, but number two, it’s critical as a sales professional, because if you’re not comfortable and confident in what you’re offering is, then it’s going to be really hard for the prospect to like you, trust you, and know what you do. Okay. You’re not going to be believable, and there’s lots of liars in this industry. So hot tip number one, I want you guys to be better public speakers and join a local toastmasters.
[00:04:25.400] – James Kernan
Go ahead and drop into the Q and A section. I just want to know, have any of you ever been in Toastmasters? It’s an international speaking club. There are chapters all around the world, certainly tons in the United States and in major metropolitan areas. There’s lots of chapters for you to join, but it’s a safe, friendly environment for you to practice public speaking.
[00:04:50.330] – James Kernan
And you may not think that that’s critical or important, but trust me, first time you get in front of a big room of people, you don’t realize practice makes perfect. I can tell you countless stories about me early in my career of what I needed to do to get mentally prepared, stop off maybe at the liquor store or say lots of prayers in the car before I go in, because speaking in front of big groups is super intimidating. It’s one of the greatest fears that we have in the world right after death is number one in public speaking is number two. That’s almost odd to me, but it’s real. So practice makes perfect, and part of what we’re presenting today.
[00:05:33.440] – James Kernan
I want you guys to just be more comfortable and confident in what your company brings to the table for these prospects. So it’s hard enough just getting the appointment, but I see so many people fail miserably when they get in front of the client for the first time, and they’re not prepared. So a couple of guys dropped into networking groups like B and I is another great one because they go around the room every single meeting, and you’ve got to kind of get up and at least give your elevator pitch of what you do, who your ideal client is. So benign chapters are good as well. So super.
[00:06:07.200] – James Kernan
All right, so I’m going to dig into the seven step sales process. And let me remind you of what that looks like. So one through seven prospecting, that’s what we were really digging into last week of the session. Two prospecting, Legion programs and appointment setting. And then you’re qualifying today.
[00:06:28.870] – James Kernan
I’m really going to kind of dig into a little bit in step two, but mostly in step three and four. And these are the first two face to face meetings that you have with your prospects. Right. So this is where I’m going to spend the bulk of today’s time, really in step three and four. So I just wanted to remind you where we’re at.
[00:06:48.830] – James Kernan
So remember, we want to sell from the top down. If you’re looking at the pyramid, there the decision making pyramid. You’ve got directors, CEOs, owners, management, middle level management, and then frontline employees. Typically when you’re making phone calls or coming into marketing, we’re coming up the food chain. And then some of the marketing that we do, like referrals are good, kind of coming down from the top.
[00:07:15.700] – James Kernan
We always want to be identifying who the decision makers are.
[00:07:22.470] – James Kernan
So we’re calling on the right people. Normally, it’s the owners, it’s the CFO, Co o, CEO, that type of individual. And we talked a lot as well in session one about who your ideal client is. So not just the title and what they do for the organization. We do want to get in front of the decision makers and the decision influencers.
[00:07:47.890] – James Kernan
But make sure in your marketing campaign that you’re aware of who your ideal client looks like. Normally, it’s someone within your 30 miles radius of your office or your people. Typically, you do. The most business currently with that industry might be nonprofits, it might be architects, it might be law firms, it might be dental offices. Make sure that you’re thinking strategically.
[00:08:15.010] – James Kernan
But the key thing I’m going to talk about today is kind of selling from the top down as we’re meeting and preparing ourselves. So before you go into the meeting, I just want to make sure, are you prepared? Are you ready to go? Do you bring value? So you’ve got to be in a position to kind of understand ahead of time what the business does, how they make money, and what potential issues they may be having.
[00:08:41.100] – James Kernan
Sometimes if you get a referral or you get some type of lead from a manufacturer or a referral partner, they’re going to tell you how they’re struggling with X, Y, and Z. Great. You want to identify the pain. You want to identify the ICC’s, which are the issues, challenges, and concerns that the business owner would have. So sometimes they’re not going to tell you that we’re not talking about that today, but go to LinkedIn, use social media, google the person’s name, google the company, go to their website.
[00:09:11.580] – James Kernan
Just try to read some information real quick so you’re comfortable and confident in what the company can do. Try to find some commonalities. Maybe you both went to the same college, or maybe you grew up in the same state, or they’re in the same industry that you started right out of college with, or maybe you know someone that works at that company. Try to find some commonalities because when you are starting the conversation with the prospect, it’s going to help immensely and start thinking about what you could do for them. Okay.
[00:09:46.410] – James Kernan
Don’t walk in and expect them to tell you everything. We need to kind of think ahead of time, of like, well, they just acquired another company about three months ago, so they’re probably struggling with maybe network security, bringing in the domains altogether, training, they’re probably concerned with cyber security. So those are all things that you kind of can assume based on what you’re reading up on their website or on social media. Okay, so let’s kind of talk about step two of the process is us really qualifying the opportunity. And that’s when from last week we are setting up the appointment.
[00:10:26.180] – James Kernan
We want to qualify before we invest time and get face to face with the prospect. You can either I like doing things like this with teams or zoom. You can do a quick five minute call, ten minute call, just to help validate some things with them. Or you could turn right around and just confirm these things over the phone. But if an appointment has been set up, remember we talked about last session two about using technology like Catalan lee and letting people schedule time on your calendar.
[00:10:57.590] – James Kernan
You want to make sure you’re still qualifying them before you go out there. Okay? Number one, if it is some kind of referral and you don’t have a confirmed appointment yet, just make sure you follow up with them as aggressively as possible. And I’m specifically talking about like a referral. Nothing’s worse than sending someone a referral and then finding out three weeks later that nobody followed up with it.
[00:11:18.430] – James Kernan
That’s embarrassing. You’ll never get another referral if that happens. So with immense intensity and energy and sense of urgency, follow up with referrals right away. Try to understand their basic needs ahead of time. Do they meet your ideal client profile?
[00:11:37.030] – James Kernan
The criteria that you’ve kind of set of what you’re looking for and we just talked about that an important piece. Send with your meeting request when you’re setting up, or maybe they’ve already set up something on your calendar. It’s okay to send a meeting invite with a copy of an agenda and I’ll talk a little bit more about an agenda. I think I gave you a copy in the handouts for today. Really simple.
[00:12:00.990] – James Kernan
I think there were five things on the agenda. Real simple agenda template that you guys can have and customize for yourselves. But prospects are more inclined to accept the meeting and go through the meeting if they know in advance what you’re going to talk about. Okay, so that’s really important. Send a calendar invite with a copy of the agenda of what you’re going to talk about, and then confirm that there will be in attendance and how much time you have in advance updated in your CRM or whatever tool you’re using to track your calendar.
[00:12:32.410] – James Kernan
And then this is an optional thing. I just wanted to bring this up. Send a Shock and Awe package ahead of time, and we may not have spoken about this before. Drop into the Q and A section. If you guys have heard of Shock and Awe package, there are some packages that are digital, that have digital assets and links, and some of them are physical boxes.
[00:12:53.450] – James Kernan
But basically, the idea behind it is a credibility builder. Before you meet with the prospect for the first time, you’re going to send them a gift or maybe a cover letter with some customer testimonials and some brochures on your company, maybe an example work product. But most of the time, like, for me, of course, I’ve got one right here. I’ve written three books, so an easy thing for me to do is include a copy of a book, any white papers that you’ve written, certifications. You’re trying to build credibility with the prospect.
[00:13:27.700] – James Kernan
And who doesn’t like gifts ahead of time? Maybe a frisbee, a pair of sunglasses. The Shock and all package is just done by design to get on the prospects good side, remind them that you’re coming out to meet them. And I’ve seen some people I really like some of the ideas I’ve seen in the physical packages that get dropped off at the office before you go meet them, or some of them have put together digital assets, and it’s just simply an email. Whatever you use, it’s completely up to you.
[00:13:59.390] – James Kernan
I don’t want you to be overwhelmed. So if you haven’t done anything like that before, just remember that idea for the future. That’s something that you might consider implementing moving forward. So here’s where we’re at. We’re at the first appointment, okay?
[00:14:14.980] – James Kernan
So here’s what our objectives are when we go meet with the prospect face to face for the very first time. So normally, the hidden agenda of the very first appointment is really to push for some type of I’ll call it a paid assessment and really have a thorough understanding of who they are, what they do, and what their issues, challenges, and concerns are. Okay? ROI means return on investment. So you want to kind of gather information.
[00:14:43.970] – James Kernan
They may be calling you in because they’ve had a problem. They may be calling you in because they have a project coming up that they need an It it It service provider. Maybe they’re ready to switch vendors because they’re old. The incumbent isn’t doing a very good job. So I always like asking lots of verbal questions.
[00:15:04.040] – James Kernan
We’re going to go through that today. And if you can’t identify the pain, then really push harder for the assessment because there’s pain there. We just haven’t asked enough questions to identify. Okay, you can complete the sales questionnaire. I’m going to walk through some of the questions on today’s presentation and there’s, I believe, a three page handout new prospect questionnaire.
[00:15:27.820] – James Kernan
That’s part of the handouts for today, but I’ll walk through that here in just a minute. The idea is you really want to understand what the business issue pain cause and how to solve that. You want to kind of think of it from a business perspective and how to use people processing technology in what you’re going to propose to them. I like doing maybe a trial close early, and if you think it’s somebody that is clearly experiencing some pain, maybe they’re unhappy with their current provider. Those are ideal customers to talk to about a paid assessment.
[00:16:02.320] – James Kernan
I don’t like giving anything away for free because what’s free is not valued. So you could offer a paid assessment. Here’s an example of what the deliverable would look like once we did our assessment. If you don’t have assessment tools or don’t want to pay for those, there’s lots of really good ones. Galactic Advisors has a great tool.
[00:16:24.390] – James Kernan
Rapid Fire Tools is a real popular one, and many of the RMM tools just have network gathering capabilities that will help you do kind of report out on what the environment looks like. But long story short, you don’t have to have a tool like that. You could just ask a series of questions, do a walk through, and that can be just as effective as well. Okay. Ideally in the first meeting, you kind of want to understand how they’ve been supporting themselves, if there’s any competitors in the room, or if they’re looking at any competitors.
[00:16:58.730] – James Kernan
Above and beyond yourself, you want to understand the competitive landscape and then try to identify who the decision makers are. Remember the question I’ve asked before? Hey, above and beyond yourself, is there anybody else involved in the decision making of what you buy and who you buy from? What is the decision making tree look like here? I just want to understand so I can address all your needs.
[00:17:24.840] – James Kernan
So you want to ask that question in the first meeting and ideally have those people there if you can. That doesn’t always happen, and I’m of the belief that you still want to go meet them regardless of all the decision makers are in the room, at least in the first meeting. Getting them all there for the second meeting is pretty important. And then set up your next meeting before you leave. That’s a little best practice tip, I promise you so you don’t get ghosted those are the goals and objectives of our first meeting.
[00:17:55.970] – James Kernan
Okay, so here’s what a copy of the agenda looks like. I gave you a copy of this. It’s real simple. Here’s the date, here’s the meeting. Let’s say your company is Kwcg and you’re meeting with a company called Two Gig.
[00:18:12.570] – James Kernan
And then the agenda is basically like this. Introductions is really right as you walk in the room. You’re going to walk around the conference room, meet with at least shake hands, and give them a business card of whoever you’re meeting with. Okay, that should just take less than a minute. Then you sit down and prepare.
[00:18:29.310] – James Kernan
And I always like saying, hey, before we get started, I just want to spend five minutes and talk about who my organization is and how we’re different or better than the competition and what we’ve done successfully in our community. But I’m just going to do that for about five minutes and then the rest of the time I really need to do a discovery and talk about your business. I want to better understand how you guys are using technology in your business and then maybe a server room tour, if you can. And then we’ll kind of talk about next steps, if that makes sense. Does that sound good to you?
[00:19:02.770] – James Kernan
So you’re sitting down. After you shake hands, you give a hard copy of the agenda. They all should have received it ahead of time as well, but I like having a hard copy agenda and then you go ahead and get started. Okay, so in public speaking and doing lots of presentations, I don’t like just getting face to face. Well, let me tell you, here’s five things about my company.
[00:19:30.780] – James Kernan
I like making it more graphical so it’s something I can share if I’m meeting one on one with someone. I’ll have an iPad or some kind of tablet where I can just flip through this so it’s more personable. If it’s like three or more people, I’ll try to pull it up on a screen and do more presentation mode, but I’m going to walk through now. The good news, I gave everybody a copy of this as well. And in Chat, here’s another question.
[00:19:57.140] – James Kernan
I’m sorry, in the Q and A section, I want you guys to answer this question. How many of you have some type of prezi or PowerPoint presentation about us on your company? I just want to know how many of you have a presentation that you could walk in and present in front of a group of people?
[00:20:19.950] – James Kernan
Okay. That’s what I thought.
[00:20:25.930] – James Kernan
That’s not uncommon. All right, so whatever you’re comfortable with, you could go to your website and walk through your website. I like presenting something graphically so people have something to look at. It’s just so much easier having a conversation when you’re presenting something graphically as opposed to just talking.
[00:20:46.510] – James Kernan
The comprehension and then understanding. It’s far more impressive if you have some type of presentation. So normally I’m going to walk through this really quick. And this was an actual presentation that I put together for an organization that didn’t have one just like you. And by the way, this is one of the handouts.
[00:21:04.770] – James Kernan
You’ll have a copy of this for you to create your own if you want to. This was a picture of the building that they rented space in. This was a picture of a data center, but that wasn’t theirs, but that still looked cool. And then the bottom was some of the awards that they had won over time. Okay, here’s the funny thing.
[00:21:32.230] – James Kernan
I saw Dan’s comment death by PowerPoint. It’s not death by PowerPoint because this presentation should take less than five minutes. And if you’re in a meeting for 45 minutes, I’m just going to take five minutes and tell you a little bit about me. And then the rest of the time I want to learn more about you. That’s why we’re here.
[00:21:49.000] – James Kernan
Okay? So you have a captive audience the very first time you meet with them. And that’s why I think it’s important to be prepared to talk about this. So I’m going to try to go through this really quick. Let me tell you a little bit more about our organization.
[00:22:03.810] – James Kernan
This is basically their slogan or their pitch. We help our customers leverage technology to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make the right decision here’s. The core values in the business company is built on these four pillars trust, integrity, expertise. We got highly technical people, and we care about our community. Many of the people involved in our organization are part of nonprofits and charities in our local community, so we certainly give back.
[00:22:36.330] – James Kernan
We have 100% customer satisfaction guarantee. If you’re not happy and can’t rank us five star service with anything that we do in our services, we’ll come back and do the work for free until you’re happy. Now, this is optional if you want to have something like this, but it gives credibility if you can offer some type of guarantee. The majority of the time, customers don’t call you on anything like this. But this is a customer satisfaction where you’ll redo the work.
[00:23:07.150] – James Kernan
You’re not refunding money. So that’s what the customer wanted to do. Here’s a little bit more about their organization. You just only pick a couple of these things. They’re headquartered in San Diego.
[00:23:18.520] – James Kernan
They acquired a small business back in 2014. They’re part of a national network that gives them capabilities to sell and support their customers all around the country. Up top is a picture of the data center where they have a cloud product. They’ve got six consulting divisions in the organization.
[00:23:43.350] – James Kernan
We don’t want to talk about things that we can do for you. We want to talk about projects that we’ve done successfully. Here’s a couple of the projects that our team members have been involved throughout their career. The San Diego Padres ballpark stadium. We are involved in a $1.2 million Cisco network infrastructure project.
[00:24:06.330] – James Kernan
AMN Health Care. We did a large active directory migration. San Diego City Schools, we did a huge migration in partnering with Microsoft on that project. And also the San Diego Airport, we did their disaster recovery plan. So all of you can say this as well.
[00:24:26.920] – James Kernan
If you think back of projects that you or your team or people that you outsource have been involved with, this one is one in particular as well. Through national distribution, we sell and support over 1700 different manufacturers, like Microsoft or Xerox, Hewlett Packard. These are some of the partners that we have access to in products and services. Here’s the six practice groups that we have as an organization cloud security, mobility, business intelligence, outsourcing or out staffing and document management. And that’s it.
[00:25:04.470] – James Kernan
Okay, so real quick, you just want to go through who you are, how you’re a little different than the competition. Now, that presentation I went through real quick, I hope left you with the feeling like, wow, those guys must be pretty big, and they have an impressive portfolio. It was just an eight person organization, and eight of the people came from different companies. And I can answer any of those bullet points. But the key point I wanted to present to you guys is you want to give as much credibility as you can.
[00:25:40.890] – James Kernan
Good selling and good marketing is making yourself look bigger and better than you really are. Without lying. You want to have credibility. And why would a big organization or someone with lots of money want to spend it with you? You have two employees.
[00:25:57.130] – James Kernan
Why would they want to spend money with you? And I want to challenge you to think about that for a second. And if you think outside the box, meaning, like, all of your capabilities, you as a person, the rest of your team, people that you subcontracted, and then other manufacturers and distributors that you buy from in the supply chain or other resellers around the country that you’re part of a network with, and I can talk more about that at a different time. Just connect with me on that. You can actually present this kind of presentation, and you’d be much more likely to bring credibility to a bigger organization or a bigger project and work on more lucrative things if you can present yourself in that light.
[00:26:42.550] – James Kernan
It depends on the target market. Depends on what you want to do. But that was something that that customer wanted me to help them with. So that’s exactly where we’re at. So I already talked about us for five minutes.
[00:26:55.190] – James Kernan
Now let’s talk about you. I’ve got some questions for you. I want to learn more about your business. Now, I did go to your website. I read that you guys just acquired a company a month ago, and you probably have some technology challenges from that, but you want to have a business conversation with, hopefully, the decision maker or the influencers.
[00:27:19.550] – James Kernan
And typically the very first meeting, you’re probably meeting with the decision influencer and maybe not the decision maker unless you’re lucky. Again, I talked about being prepared in advance and know some things about them personally, so you can kind of connect, like, hey, I saw that you went to Michigan State. That’s pretty cool. All my brothers and sister went to Michigan State. Ghostbartons so you want to try to align with something that you have in common.
[00:27:45.510] – James Kernan
It just makes the conversation much easier. When you’re asking questions, you just want to make sure you’ve got a thorough understanding of what they’re talking about around how they use technology in their business. It either makes them money or saves them money, and it’s always not perfect. So the questions I’m going to show you in the questionnaire form are something that’s important. And the last point I wanted to make is if there’s no pain when you’re talking through these questions, asking questions, taking lots of notes, if they keep saying, everything’s great, everything’s fantastic, we don’t have any problems.
[00:28:24.450] – James Kernan
You’re there for a reason. They’re spending time with you for a reason, and they either may not know it or they’re lying to you. But you need to keep asking good questions. And that’s where you would really try to push for a tool assessment, for you to drop an assessment tool and gather data. Now, if it’s a customer that you really want, say, look, I feel like I’m such a great fit for your organization.
[00:28:49.050] – James Kernan
You’re exactly who fits our ideal customer profile. I’m going to do this for no charge. We normally charge $1,500 for this, but I feel we’re really good fit. It’s going to give me additional data that we haven’t been able to talk about today. And I’m going to offer this to you free of charge if you’re open and willing to that.
[00:29:08.110] – James Kernan
It’ll only take 30 minutes at our next meeting. Are you open to that? So you want to try to offer a paid assessment. If you feel like that’s not going to work, you’re the boss. You can switch it and do a free assessment.
[00:29:24.710] – James Kernan
So I’m not going to read through all of these. I’ve got three pages of questions that you can use, but I want you to start the conversation once you get to this stage. You did introductions. You did about us for five minutes. Okay.
[00:29:41.040] – James Kernan
Now why have you asked me to come here today?
[00:29:45.870] – James Kernan
Maybe you know some things in advance and you talked on the phone and they’ve been having issues with their backups. Besides your backups, is there anything else going on that you guys are struggling with, with technology? I like to have a candid conversation, so I always like it being direct, but I like asking a question like that in the very. Beginning. So why have you asked me to come meet with you today?
[00:30:08.020] – James Kernan
Tell me more about your business. I did some research on you already. I can see you’re a manufacturing company. You just bought another company that you’re blending together about a month ago. You’ve been in business over 30 years.
[00:30:19.810] – James Kernan
But tell me a little bit more about your company. How do you guys make money? That’s a great leading question. That is conversational and we’ll get people talking about. Another one is what are your business goals in the next 36 months?
[00:30:35.010] – James Kernan
And I can promise you this, most of your competitors when they come in there and have a conversation in the first meeting, they’re not asking what the company’s goals and objectives are. They’re just trying to do speeds and feeds on their server and understand what technology they have. They’re not asking business questions. And when you have a business conversation you’re going to position yourself ahead of the competition. Okay so a couple of other key bullet points.
[00:31:01.880] – James Kernan
So you start conversation that way. Take lots of notes and remember, be a good listener. So listen first before you speak and then identify the customer’s decision making process and who else is involved in the decision making tree. I already talked about that. Identify the top pain points.
[00:31:20.400] – James Kernan
Have you had any loss of data? Have you had any downtime? Has there been any issues of slowness or productivity problems or poor morale? You want to kind of understand how that’s impacting the business. The questionnaire that I gave you has questions on that and then identify who the current vendor is and what type of equipment that maybe they have a standard where it’s all Hewlett Packard where it’s all Microsoft or they hate Microsoft and they have Linux servers.
[00:31:51.970] – James Kernan
You want to understand what technology they’re using to run their business, what line of business applications. Okay so this is a little bit of an eye chart and I’m not going to go through this but these are some additional questions that can help you of just gathering the data that you need in order to put a proposal together. Okay. So you can ask some of these as you’re going down. A lot of this stuff I had memorized by the time I repeated it and had done it so many times.
[00:32:21.700] – James Kernan
But in the very beginning I didn’t. And I had a portfolio that I used to always open up. One would have my written notes like this. All the questions on the left and on the right. It was just a blank notepad where I would take notes and I would look at what questions to ask and based on how the feeling was in the conversation you’re not going to want to go.
[00:32:43.030] – James Kernan
Okay. Question number three is you want it kind of fluid and conversational, if that makes sense. And based on what the prospect is telling you that should lead you to the next question. Normally you’re not going to be able to get through all of the questions that I had listed. And I also in the questionnaire, I put different categories, like if they want to just talk about data backup or line of business apps or document management, there are questions directly related to that.
[00:33:15.200] – James Kernan
Okay, so again, just to recap the very first meeting, you want to really try to push for an assessment and gather as much information about the business as you can. You want to get answers on the sales questionnaires as much as possible by just having a general conversation. And it’s important. I am a note taker. I think that’s the way I learned and that’s the way I teach.
[00:33:42.000] – James Kernan
I think all of you should be good note takers in the meeting. Just be careful. Don’t have a laptop, that the lid is up in front of the face, your face, so you can’t have eye contact with the customer or the prospect. If you are a technology guru and you want to do that kind of turn so you can face them this way, but type sideways, if that makes sense. You don’t want to break the energy and the eye contact where if you’re writing things down on maybe an electronic tablet, take notes, but keep good eye contact as often as you can.
[00:34:15.650] – James Kernan
I think that’s really important. You want to really try to understand the challenges. And I’ve gone through this, but these again are what the objectives are in the step three of the sales process. But normally that’s your very first meeting with the prospect. Okay?
[00:34:33.690] – James Kernan
So you get through that. Hopefully they’ll give you an opportunity to either you gathered all the data that you needed on the assessment and they shared what their pain is great. Then you’re ready to go to the next step. If you haven’t identified where their pain is or what they need, then we really need to push for an assessment. And that’s where I would recommend maybe offering a complimentary assessment so you could gather the data and find some type of vulnerabilities that you could use as pain to sell into.
[00:35:03.250] – James Kernan
Okay? When you do that, you gather all the data. Now you guys have what you need to come back in and get ready for the next meeting. So the next meeting is what I call the assessment presentation. And Dan, this is your favorite because this is another PowerPoint.
[00:35:20.440] – James Kernan
So it’s a very short presentation. Again, I like being graphical and sharing pictures and what our findings are. But to me, that’s how the big consulting agencies sell. They sell off presentations and they do very short and concise. But there’s a process to it and I’ll help explain it in just a minute because one of the other handouts that I’ve got for you is the assessment review.
[00:35:49.830] – James Kernan
So the pain, the issues, we’ve confirmed that with the decision maker or the decision influencer. We’re going to talk about that in meeting number two. And then there’s some ideas, what I call a wedge. And in the assessment presentation, I’ll talk about that in a minute. There’s some different ideas from high, medium low.
[00:36:15.810] – James Kernan
Without doing a full proposal, you’re just coming up with general pricing of, okay, we can support you or we can fix this problem for you in this range. And this is what I call boxing them in, or a wedge. You want to kind of box them in and look at the body language as you give them numbers as kind of a trial closed technique to see how they react to it. And normally, if the gap is wide enough, $5000 to $1,500. Because we’ve got a couple of offerings here.
[00:36:44.420] – James Kernan
I want to talk to you about how we could resolve this for you. You can see the body language of the prospect, and you’re like, okay, I’m in the zone. And most of the time, they’re not going to tell you exactly what they were paying before, but if you ask the right questions, you can get a pretty good idea of how they were supporting themselves before and approximately what they were paying. Okay. All right, so here’s the agenda for meeting number two.
[00:37:10.820] – James Kernan
So here is one of the other handouts I gave you. It’s the assessment agenda. Meeting number two, it’s very short and sweet. The very first thing I want to do, I’ll hand out a copy of the agenda. Hey, thanks for letting me come back in.
[00:37:25.110] – James Kernan
I want to first ask, has anything changed since our last meeting?
[00:37:31.410] – James Kernan
You fired your CFO. Okay. It’s kind of important for me to know that kind of stuff, or we’ve just acquired another company and I couldn’t talk about that. I’m shocked and surprised at how many times I’ll ask that question. And people will tell you something huge that can affect or could help or hurt you in the sales process.
[00:37:52.460] – James Kernan
So I always like asking that question first most of the time. Oh, no, we’re good. Nothing’s really changed. We’re just kind of interested to see what you guys have in your assessment. All right, cool.
[00:38:04.130] – James Kernan
So let me dig into the next part of the agenda, reviewing our findings of the assessment. I’m going to do that real quick, and then we’ll give you some recommendations and then we’ll talk about next steps, if that makes sense for you. Okay, sounds good. And I’m back to Dan’s favorite PowerPoint. Same slide, but this time I put the logo here of the company.
[00:38:26.810] – James Kernan
I’m meeting with a company this time called the ABC. And then this is just a legal disclaimer. I normally would never read this, but if we did leave it behind, this is in my template. You guys can keep that in there if you want. All my attorney friends would say leave it in there.
[00:38:45.600] – James Kernan
But regardless if they paid you or not, you want to limit your liability and I think that’s important. So in this assessment presentation, we did an assessment. I’m going to go through the findings of what we found. I break it down into six categories, the network, the servers, your email, backups, power distribution and security. And then we’ve got some recommendations for you.
[00:39:12.300] – James Kernan
That’s what I’m going to go through. This is really important, this slide. All you’re going to do is restate what the issues, challenges and concerns of what you’ve talked about, what you found. You should have a strong understanding by this time of what it is. So you invited us initially to talk about your backups because you’ve been struggling with your backups.
[00:39:34.370] – James Kernan
You did a test restore and you knew you didn’t have all the data. So we’ve identified some things there. We’re going to talk about that, but we found a couple of other issues that are X, Y and Z that I’d like to talk to you about today. Does that sound good? You just want to get buy in and you’re pointing out to them that you understand what their business challenges are.
[00:39:52.990] – James Kernan
That’s the number one point of really this assessment presentation. And then this is where I kind of like the graphical representation. Green is good, yellow is warning, and red is failing. So here’s what our assessment tool found. I’m just kind of giving this is just a couple of pages of what the summary is.
[00:40:16.850] – James Kernan
The executive overview network has had some slowness, but that’s not really a major issue. We could maybe upgrade some switches. The servers are really where some of the issues are and where the slowness is. You’ve already know as part of your project plan, you wanted to replace some of these servers moving forward. So we’ve got some ideas for you there.
[00:40:37.410] – James Kernan
Email is okay. There are some issues with connectivity, but I think it’s more slowness related to number one. And two, I just talked about the backups are really the issues. You’ve had some issues with the backups and we’ve got some recommendations on that power insecurity. So this is kind of a holistic approach and a real simplistic approach of here are the six things that we looked at.
[00:41:03.690] – James Kernan
Here’s what our recommendations are. You can walk through this really quick. The very bottom part here is, here’s what we’re recommending. We’ve got three different options for you. We’ve got our best, kind of the middle of the road, and then our low end offering.
[00:41:18.830] – James Kernan
They start at from 1500 up to $4,000. Does that meet the budget for you? And that’s where you would do a trial close. And you don’t have a detailed proposal yet. You’re just trying to say, hey, we can take care of all these things for you over time.
[00:41:35.830] – James Kernan
Depends on the sense of urgency that you have and the levels of sophistication and compliance that you need. Here’s the range that we have. And then based on the feedback that you get as a consultant. I always like sharing my opinion. We’re going to recommend this $4,000 package, but we’ll talk more about that in detail.
[00:41:55.800] – James Kernan
I just want to make sure that this is in the range. Does that make sense? And normally you’re getting buy end by them nodding their head or saying yes, and then basically that’s the tail end of the presentation. And then, hey, let me talk about our managed service a little bit more. This is the chart that I found best being in the industry for a long time.
[00:42:19.780] – James Kernan
This was an example of something I had gotten from Gary Pica a long time ago. And I like this because it really explains managed services in four quadrants. It talks about proactive technology management, talks about network administration, talks about the reactive services. And if you don’t have a tool in place or you’re not using a managed service provider with tools like we have everything’s reactive. But once we automate things, we can do a lot of the proactive and automation stuff upfront, the network admin stuff that’s not getting done by your current provider, then we can do the reactive stuff.
[00:42:56.710] – James Kernan
But the reactive stuff is much lower down the pipeline because we’re doing part one and part two first. And then the most valuable part is really the technology consulting. And that’s our CIO services, where we’ve got the tools. We want to be part of your annual budget. We want to be part of your decision making.
[00:43:18.550] – James Kernan
But consult with us so we can measure the business impact of any of the technology decisions that you have. Okay. And use us as a sounding board. This part right here is the most important value I think many of you bring to the table is your knowledge, the consulting part. So I kind of liked explaining managed services and that’s how do you have any questions about what we talked about?
[00:43:44.920] – James Kernan
So that’s the end of the presentation and the whole point of us going through those presentations. So we went through meeting one, went through meeting two, wedged them in with what our recommendations are. And it’s important to always focus on selling the problem that you solve, not the product. We’re not selling products. We’re selling solutions to the problems that they have.
[00:44:10.670] – James Kernan
That’s what’s impactful for these prospects. Okay, so here’s another tip I’ll share with you. This happens all the time early in the sales process. It might be before you even qualify the prospect. Hey, James, what’s your price per hour?
[00:44:29.620] – James Kernan
I just need to know what your price per hour is. Well, the answer to that is I don’t know because I don’t know enough about your business. I haven’t asked you enough questions, so I don’t know the answer because I haven’t asked you enough questions is how I would have responded to that. There was one time, so most of the time that’s good enough. And they want to meet with you or at least talk to you on the phone and answer a bunch of your questions so you can get a better understanding.
[00:44:55.610] – James Kernan
And I would always say that until I got through the assessment and I gathered enough data on there where I have a pretty good idea of what we could do for them. And if anywhere in the sales process, if you can’t bring value or what you bring to the table is far more expensive than what they can afford, then qualify out world professionals. We can step back and say no and you don’t want to waste your time. If we’re not providing the right value where they don’t see the value, you would just say, hey, I don’t feel like I’m a good fit for what you’re looking for. You can call company ABC down the street and they may be able to help you out, but try not to give a price per hour because then that will pin you down.
[00:45:41.620] – James Kernan
You’ll make a lot more margin instead of just saying what a published price is. Okay, so a couple of other things I wanted to offer up before I can answer any questions. Be careful to identify your ideal customer in the very get go. Okay? You can see this process.
[00:46:00.120] – James Kernan
This takes some time. It takes time to meet with them and understand more about their business. It takes time to do an assessment or to analyze all the questions and answers that you’ve gathered. It takes time to meet with them a second time and walk through these presentations. So you want to make sure that you’re meeting with someone that you have a strong likelihood of closing.
[00:46:23.420] – James Kernan
Start at the top. We want the decision makers in the room in the first meeting if possible, at the minimum the second meeting. Remember, the quality of your offer equals the quality of your response. If you just have an hourly price list and oh, here’s how we could work with you, you’re not really offering a solution to their problems. You just build by the hour and it means to me that you don’t understand what their challenges are.
[00:46:52.000] – James Kernan
You don’t have any ideas, but you’d figure it out by billing them by the hour. That is a perfect example of someone who’s going to struggle closing a deal unless they are in dire need. And then the timing and the urgency of your contact and the need of the customer. We always want to understand the timeline because that’s going to excel the sales processor or slow things down. Okay, so I walked through the steps three and four of the sales process and it’s really once you get the appointment, what do you do?
[00:47:30.790] – James Kernan
I just walked through that. I gave you all the templates of steps three and four, the agendas, the questionnaire, and both of the presentations that you can use and customize yourself if you want to present yourself that way. I found after being in the industry for so long in 30 years, that’s the best process that I’ve seen that’s most effective in closing deals. Okay. And really the homework I would say for you guys would be the very first meeting.
[00:48:02.180] – James Kernan
So it was step three where you did the general company overview. I think there was about an eight or nine page PowerPoint that I put together for you guys. I would encourage you to customize something for yourself. You’re going to build so much more credibility if you could put a decent customer overview presentation together and try to always do that either yourself or your salespeople. The very first five minutes of the first prospect meeting, you want to ideally bring that up and highlight, hey, I’m here for this.
[00:48:37.670] – James Kernan
We’re going to talk about this. But I can do these other things as well because normally that’s the best time because you’ve got a captive audience to help. Okay, so session four is next week, same time, same Bat channel, and we got a few minutes left. I went through a lot of content. I wanted to kind of open things up and ask if you guys have any questions, go ahead and drop them in chat here or in the Q amp a box.
[00:49:05.560] – James Kernan
So I see one of the questions David had mentioned, can you give an example of how to answer the hourly price question? So yeah, thanks for that, Dave. So I kind of started going down that path, and I think I didn’t finish my thought. There was a time I remember being called on that myself. And they’re like, James, that’s all great, but I need to know what your hourly price is.
[00:49:26.900] – James Kernan
And I said, okay, well, one, we typically don’t do hourly prices because we have monthly services and we offer our services as a platform with a low monthly fee. So it’s predictable, you know, how much it’s going to cost every month. So it’s a monthly fee. It’s not an hourly fee. And normally that will get them.
[00:49:51.320] – James Kernan
There was one time there was boy, I was meeting with the Wicked Witch of the West, I think, and she was like, James, you’re not answering my question. And then I gave her a range. Okay. So I’m back to that wedge technique. I said, well, our service pricing is low as $100 per hour.
[00:50:12.200] – James Kernan
Upwards of $225 an hour depends upon the level of expertise of the professional that we send $225 or our data infrastructure experts, our security guys. The low end would be a level one technician offering more desktop support. That’s the range. But we normally don’t sell like that. We take a combination of our whole team and we bring that as a service offering as a solution to you.
[00:50:40.320] – James Kernan
And we typically charge on a monthly basis. Some project related companies are going to want to know how many hours, and you could put forth a good faith estimate. It will be 100 hours, 200 hours, or 500 hours for a big project. That’s how you would quote that out. But subscription income when you’re doing It support proactive maintenance and reactive maintenance on networks you typically do not want to charge by the hour.
[00:51:08.640] – James Kernan
You’ll make a lot more money and you’ll be much more successful, and you’ll stay stickier with a client if you can package it as a monthly service offering. Okay, so any other questions? Let’s see.
[00:51:22.850] – James Kernan
Do you have the Ayce support or bill separately for contract work? So I think if I understand your question, if I have a maintenance contract for It support with a client and then they’ve got projects, is that what you’re asking? Go ahead and type in Dan. If I’m answering, that all you can eat. Okay, so I do have a spreadsheet.
[00:51:51.670] – James Kernan
Dan email me. Here’s my email address and anybody else that wants it. I have an exercise called the MSP comparison chart, and that comparison chart has column number one. Here’s what the hourly rates would be for clients that have no support contract if they called, hey, my servers down. I need to get out here right now.
[00:52:11.280] – James Kernan
Here’s what they would get. And then there were three offerings. Normally, it’s a remote. It’s like a remote monitoring, where you’re monitoring and automating what you can with antivirus and patches. That’s the lowest offering.
[00:52:27.730] – James Kernan
And then there’s a remote plan in the middle where you get that, but you also get the reactive support if they call into your help desk Monday through Friday, eight to five. And then All You Can Eat would be, of course you go on site and do the work. I will say my opinion real quick. I do not like the All You Can Eat, where you bundle in all the projects as well. I think you should peel out projects.
[00:52:52.930] – James Kernan
Like if somebody is growing you all You Can Eat. Meaning you go on site and you get everything in plan A. B. And C. But if you do have projects.
[00:53:01.590] – James Kernan
If you buy ten new workstations and I need to image them and set them up. Or you need to virtualize your whole environment. Or we’re going to move things into a data center. You want to charge for projects. You don’t want to typically leave that.
[00:53:20.370] – James Kernan
All right, I think I’ve answered the questions. Great questions, guys. Thank you. And travel time is something else, too, in that MSP comparison chart exercise. You could say that you charge travel time and you have a two hour minimum on site and the fee is really expensive.
[00:53:38.410] – James Kernan
But if you have a support contract, then we won’t charge travel time as long as you’re within our 30 miles radius, for example.
[00:53:48.390] – James Kernan
And then there are other benefits, like bringing the price down overall. So you want everybody in some type of maintenance program. So cool. All right, I think I’ve answered all the questions. Questions.
[00:54:03.780] – James Kernan
Thanks, everybody. Email me if you have any questions. And connect on social media. Great class today. Good content and fire up.
[00:54:12.100] – James Kernan
Let’s close some deals. We’ll see you next time. Session four. Take care, everybody. Bye.
[00:00:01.690] – James Kernan
All right everybody, welcome back. We’re going to go ahead and get started with session three of how to run a prospect’s meeting. And we’re going to really dive into steps three and four of the sales process that we’ve outlined. Let’s go ahead and get started. I got tons of great content for you.
[00:00:18.540] – James Kernan
I’m actually excited about today because I think this will be a difference maker inside your practice. And I’ve got some extra handouts for you as well. So let’s get rolling. So hopefully you all know me or recognize me. James Kernan, current Consulting.
[00:00:34.870] – James Kernan
I’ve been in the industry for about 30 years and started as an MSP business owner the first half of my career, bought, sold, owner, ran seven different tech companies, all primarily out in the state of California. Real successful track record. Sold my last business in 2006 and became a business coach. So here I am. I love doing what I’m doing and giving back to the community and helping people become more successful because I’ve been there, done that, and it’s lonely at the top and sometimes you need some encouragement and sharing of best practices.
[00:01:10.730] – James Kernan
So today’s agenda, I’m going to go through a real quick program overview, just remind you where we’re at in the process. We’re going to dig into session three, which is really sales process. The point of today is obviously this is lead gen and appointment setting, right? But when you get face time with the prospect, I want you to be prepared and know exactly what to say. Okay?
[00:01:34.640] – James Kernan
So when you get there, when you show up at the show and you’re at meeting number one or meeting number two, that’s what we’re going to go through today. So I’ve got some great handouts for you as well. And then we’ll wrap up and hopefully share a couple of questions. So we’re at session three of our five part series, the program objectives. Number one, first and foremost, everything starts with a plan.
[00:01:57.540] – James Kernan
So I gave everybody and already done for you sales playbook for you to customize to your own business. So that’s number one. Number two, appointment setting basics. From a Legion standpoint, that was actually session two. And then how to run the first and second meetings.
[00:02:15.990] – James Kernan
That’s kind of what I’m going to go into today, how to make customers for life. And then how to create presentations that can help you close the deal and increase your chances. We’re going to talk about that. So here we are, sales process, session three. So before I get started, I wanted to make sure that I wanted to find out if anybody had any questions.
[00:02:39.590] – James Kernan
We’ve gone through a ton of content already. Session one was super heavy. Session two, I kind of went through a little bit more of the sales playbook. I had some good questions and conversations with people primarily between week one and week two, but I just wanted to find out, drop into the Q and A section. That’s how we can communicate.
[00:03:02.830] – James Kernan
If you guys have any questions about the homework thus far or anything that you want me to address if you don’t have anything right now, as I’m going through the presentation today, through training, drop into the Q and A section, and I’ll try to answer the questions as we go or for sure at the end. Welcome, David. Happy to have you. No worries. We’ve got the trainings recorded and all the handouts, so be aware there are several handouts in most all of the classes, including today.
[00:03:33.260] – James Kernan
So there we go. All right, cool. Thank you. So something I wanted to share with you, the art of being a great salesperson is really the ability to communicate properly. And when I talk about communication, primarily it’s public speaking.
[00:03:51.900] – James Kernan
It’s getting up in front of a room of people and speaking confidently about what you do. Number one, it’s important as a leader, but number two, it’s critical as a sales professional, because if you’re not comfortable and confident in what you’re offering is, then it’s going to be really hard for the prospect to like you, trust you, and know what you do. Okay. You’re not going to be believable, and there’s lots of liars in this industry. So hot tip number one, I want you guys to be better public speakers and join a local toastmasters.
[00:04:25.400] – James Kernan
Go ahead and drop into the Q and A section. I just want to know, have any of you ever been in Toastmasters? It’s an international speaking club. There are chapters all around the world, certainly tons in the United States and in major metropolitan areas. There’s lots of chapters for you to join, but it’s a safe, friendly environment for you to practice public speaking.
[00:04:50.330] – James Kernan
And you may not think that that’s critical or important, but trust me, first time you get in front of a big room of people, you don’t realize practice makes perfect. I can tell you countless stories about me early in my career of what I needed to do to get mentally prepared, stop off maybe at the liquor store or say lots of prayers in the car before I go in, because speaking in front of big groups is super intimidating. It’s one of the greatest fears that we have in the world right after death is number one in public speaking is number two. That’s almost odd to me, but it’s real. So practice makes perfect, and part of what we’re presenting today.
[00:05:33.440] – James Kernan
I want you guys to just be more comfortable and confident in what your company brings to the table for these prospects. So it’s hard enough just getting the appointment, but I see so many people fail miserably when they get in front of the client for the first time, and they’re not prepared. So a couple of guys dropped into networking groups like B and I is another great one because they go around the room every single meeting, and you’ve got to kind of get up and at least give your elevator pitch of what you do, who your ideal client is. So benign chapters are good as well. So super.
[00:06:07.200] – James Kernan
All right, so I’m going to dig into the seven step sales process. And let me remind you of what that looks like. So one through seven prospecting, that’s what we were really digging into last week of the session. Two prospecting, Legion programs and appointment setting. And then you’re qualifying today.
[00:06:28.870] – James Kernan
I’m really going to kind of dig into a little bit in step two, but mostly in step three and four. And these are the first two face to face meetings that you have with your prospects. Right. So this is where I’m going to spend the bulk of today’s time, really in step three and four. So I just wanted to remind you where we’re at.
[00:06:48.830] – James Kernan
So remember, we want to sell from the top down. If you’re looking at the pyramid, there the decision making pyramid. You’ve got directors, CEOs, owners, management, middle level management, and then frontline employees. Typically when you’re making phone calls or coming into marketing, we’re coming up the food chain. And then some of the marketing that we do, like referrals are good, kind of coming down from the top.
[00:07:15.700] – James Kernan
We always want to be identifying who the decision makers are.
[00:07:22.470] – James Kernan
So we’re calling on the right people. Normally, it’s the owners, it’s the CFO, Co o, CEO, that type of individual. And we talked a lot as well in session one about who your ideal client is. So not just the title and what they do for the organization. We do want to get in front of the decision makers and the decision influencers.
[00:07:47.890] – James Kernan
But make sure in your marketing campaign that you’re aware of who your ideal client looks like. Normally, it’s someone within your 30 miles radius of your office or your people. Typically, you do. The most business currently with that industry might be nonprofits, it might be architects, it might be law firms, it might be dental offices. Make sure that you’re thinking strategically.
[00:08:15.010] – James Kernan
But the key thing I’m going to talk about today is kind of selling from the top down as we’re meeting and preparing ourselves. So before you go into the meeting, I just want to make sure, are you prepared? Are you ready to go? Do you bring value? So you’ve got to be in a position to kind of understand ahead of time what the business does, how they make money, and what potential issues they may be having.
[00:08:41.100] – James Kernan
Sometimes if you get a referral or you get some type of lead from a manufacturer or a referral partner, they’re going to tell you how they’re struggling with X, Y, and Z. Great. You want to identify the pain. You want to identify the ICC’s, which are the issues, challenges, and concerns that the business owner would have. So sometimes they’re not going to tell you that we’re not talking about that today, but go to LinkedIn, use social media, google the person’s name, google the company, go to their website.
[00:09:11.580] – James Kernan
Just try to read some information real quick so you’re comfortable and confident in what the company can do. Try to find some commonalities. Maybe you both went to the same college, or maybe you grew up in the same state, or they’re in the same industry that you started right out of college with, or maybe you know someone that works at that company. Try to find some commonalities because when you are starting the conversation with the prospect, it’s going to help immensely and start thinking about what you could do for them. Okay.
[00:09:46.410] – James Kernan
Don’t walk in and expect them to tell you everything. We need to kind of think ahead of time, of like, well, they just acquired another company about three months ago, so they’re probably struggling with maybe network security, bringing in the domains altogether, training, they’re probably concerned with cyber security. So those are all things that you kind of can assume based on what you’re reading up on their website or on social media. Okay, so let’s kind of talk about step two of the process is us really qualifying the opportunity. And that’s when from last week we are setting up the appointment.
[00:10:26.180] – James Kernan
We want to qualify before we invest time and get face to face with the prospect. You can either I like doing things like this with teams or zoom. You can do a quick five minute call, ten minute call, just to help validate some things with them. Or you could turn right around and just confirm these things over the phone. But if an appointment has been set up, remember we talked about last session two about using technology like Catalan lee and letting people schedule time on your calendar.
[00:10:57.590] – James Kernan
You want to make sure you’re still qualifying them before you go out there. Okay? Number one, if it is some kind of referral and you don’t have a confirmed appointment yet, just make sure you follow up with them as aggressively as possible. And I’m specifically talking about like a referral. Nothing’s worse than sending someone a referral and then finding out three weeks later that nobody followed up with it.
[00:11:18.430] – James Kernan
That’s embarrassing. You’ll never get another referral if that happens. So with immense intensity and energy and sense of urgency, follow up with referrals right away. Try to understand their basic needs ahead of time. Do they meet your ideal client profile?
[00:11:37.030] – James Kernan
The criteria that you’ve kind of set of what you’re looking for and we just talked about that an important piece. Send with your meeting request when you’re setting up, or maybe they’ve already set up something on your calendar. It’s okay to send a meeting invite with a copy of an agenda and I’ll talk a little bit more about an agenda. I think I gave you a copy in the handouts for today. Really simple.
[00:12:00.990] – James Kernan
I think there were five things on the agenda. Real simple agenda template that you guys can have and customize for yourselves. But prospects are more inclined to accept the meeting and go through the meeting if they know in advance what you’re going to talk about. Okay, so that’s really important. Send a calendar invite with a copy of the agenda of what you’re going to talk about, and then confirm that there will be in attendance and how much time you have in advance updated in your CRM or whatever tool you’re using to track your calendar.
[00:12:32.410] – James Kernan
And then this is an optional thing. I just wanted to bring this up. Send a Shock and Awe package ahead of time, and we may not have spoken about this before. Drop into the Q and A section. If you guys have heard of Shock and Awe package, there are some packages that are digital, that have digital assets and links, and some of them are physical boxes.
[00:12:53.450] – James Kernan
But basically, the idea behind it is a credibility builder. Before you meet with the prospect for the first time, you’re going to send them a gift or maybe a cover letter with some customer testimonials and some brochures on your company, maybe an example work product. But most of the time, like, for me, of course, I’ve got one right here. I’ve written three books, so an easy thing for me to do is include a copy of a book, any white papers that you’ve written, certifications. You’re trying to build credibility with the prospect.
[00:13:27.700] – James Kernan
And who doesn’t like gifts ahead of time? Maybe a frisbee, a pair of sunglasses. The Shock and all package is just done by design to get on the prospects good side, remind them that you’re coming out to meet them. And I’ve seen some people I really like some of the ideas I’ve seen in the physical packages that get dropped off at the office before you go meet them, or some of them have put together digital assets, and it’s just simply an email. Whatever you use, it’s completely up to you.
[00:13:59.390] – James Kernan
I don’t want you to be overwhelmed. So if you haven’t done anything like that before, just remember that idea for the future. That’s something that you might consider implementing moving forward. So here’s where we’re at. We’re at the first appointment, okay?
[00:14:14.980] – James Kernan
So here’s what our objectives are when we go meet with the prospect face to face for the very first time. So normally, the hidden agenda of the very first appointment is really to push for some type of I’ll call it a paid assessment and really have a thorough understanding of who they are, what they do, and what their issues, challenges, and concerns are. Okay? ROI means return on investment. So you want to kind of gather information.
[00:14:43.970] – James Kernan
They may be calling you in because they’ve had a problem. They may be calling you in because they have a project coming up that they need an It it It service provider. Maybe they’re ready to switch vendors because they’re old. The incumbent isn’t doing a very good job. So I always like asking lots of verbal questions.
[00:15:04.040] – James Kernan
We’re going to go through that today. And if you can’t identify the pain, then really push harder for the assessment because there’s pain there. We just haven’t asked enough questions to identify. Okay, you can complete the sales questionnaire. I’m going to walk through some of the questions on today’s presentation and there’s, I believe, a three page handout new prospect questionnaire.
[00:15:27.820] – James Kernan
That’s part of the handouts for today, but I’ll walk through that here in just a minute. The idea is you really want to understand what the business issue pain cause and how to solve that. You want to kind of think of it from a business perspective and how to use people processing technology in what you’re going to propose to them. I like doing maybe a trial close early, and if you think it’s somebody that is clearly experiencing some pain, maybe they’re unhappy with their current provider. Those are ideal customers to talk to about a paid assessment.
[00:16:02.320] – James Kernan
I don’t like giving anything away for free because what’s free is not valued. So you could offer a paid assessment. Here’s an example of what the deliverable would look like once we did our assessment. If you don’t have assessment tools or don’t want to pay for those, there’s lots of really good ones. Galactic Advisors has a great tool.
[00:16:24.390] – James Kernan
Rapid Fire Tools is a real popular one, and many of the RMM tools just have network gathering capabilities that will help you do kind of report out on what the environment looks like. But long story short, you don’t have to have a tool like that. You could just ask a series of questions, do a walk through, and that can be just as effective as well. Okay. Ideally in the first meeting, you kind of want to understand how they’ve been supporting themselves, if there’s any competitors in the room, or if they’re looking at any competitors.
[00:16:58.730] – James Kernan
Above and beyond yourself, you want to understand the competitive landscape and then try to identify who the decision makers are. Remember the question I’ve asked before? Hey, above and beyond yourself, is there anybody else involved in the decision making of what you buy and who you buy from? What is the decision making tree look like here? I just want to understand so I can address all your needs.
[00:17:24.840] – James Kernan
So you want to ask that question in the first meeting and ideally have those people there if you can. That doesn’t always happen, and I’m of the belief that you still want to go meet them regardless of all the decision makers are in the room, at least in the first meeting. Getting them all there for the second meeting is pretty important. And then set up your next meeting before you leave. That’s a little best practice tip, I promise you so you don’t get ghosted those are the goals and objectives of our first meeting.
[00:17:55.970] – James Kernan
Okay, so here’s what a copy of the agenda looks like. I gave you a copy of this. It’s real simple. Here’s the date, here’s the meeting. Let’s say your company is Kwcg and you’re meeting with a company called Two Gig.
[00:18:12.570] – James Kernan
And then the agenda is basically like this. Introductions is really right as you walk in the room. You’re going to walk around the conference room, meet with at least shake hands, and give them a business card of whoever you’re meeting with. Okay, that should just take less than a minute. Then you sit down and prepare.
[00:18:29.310] – James Kernan
And I always like saying, hey, before we get started, I just want to spend five minutes and talk about who my organization is and how we’re different or better than the competition and what we’ve done successfully in our community. But I’m just going to do that for about five minutes and then the rest of the time I really need to do a discovery and talk about your business. I want to better understand how you guys are using technology in your business and then maybe a server room tour, if you can. And then we’ll kind of talk about next steps, if that makes sense. Does that sound good to you?
[00:19:02.770] – James Kernan
So you’re sitting down. After you shake hands, you give a hard copy of the agenda. They all should have received it ahead of time as well, but I like having a hard copy agenda and then you go ahead and get started. Okay, so in public speaking and doing lots of presentations, I don’t like just getting face to face. Well, let me tell you, here’s five things about my company.
[00:19:30.780] – James Kernan
I like making it more graphical so it’s something I can share if I’m meeting one on one with someone. I’ll have an iPad or some kind of tablet where I can just flip through this so it’s more personable. If it’s like three or more people, I’ll try to pull it up on a screen and do more presentation mode, but I’m going to walk through now. The good news, I gave everybody a copy of this as well. And in Chat, here’s another question.
[00:19:57.140] – James Kernan
I’m sorry, in the Q and A section, I want you guys to answer this question. How many of you have some type of prezi or PowerPoint presentation about us on your company? I just want to know how many of you have a presentation that you could walk in and present in front of a group of people?
[00:20:19.950] – James Kernan
Okay. That’s what I thought.
[00:20:25.930] – James Kernan
That’s not uncommon. All right, so whatever you’re comfortable with, you could go to your website and walk through your website. I like presenting something graphically so people have something to look at. It’s just so much easier having a conversation when you’re presenting something graphically as opposed to just talking.
[00:20:46.510] – James Kernan
The comprehension and then understanding. It’s far more impressive if you have some type of presentation. So normally I’m going to walk through this really quick. And this was an actual presentation that I put together for an organization that didn’t have one just like you. And by the way, this is one of the handouts.
[00:21:04.770] – James Kernan
You’ll have a copy of this for you to create your own if you want to. This was a picture of the building that they rented space in. This was a picture of a data center, but that wasn’t theirs, but that still looked cool. And then the bottom was some of the awards that they had won over time. Okay, here’s the funny thing.
[00:21:32.230] – James Kernan
I saw Dan’s comment death by PowerPoint. It’s not death by PowerPoint because this presentation should take less than five minutes. And if you’re in a meeting for 45 minutes, I’m just going to take five minutes and tell you a little bit about me. And then the rest of the time I want to learn more about you. That’s why we’re here.
[00:21:49.000] – James Kernan
Okay? So you have a captive audience the very first time you meet with them. And that’s why I think it’s important to be prepared to talk about this. So I’m going to try to go through this really quick. Let me tell you a little bit more about our organization.
[00:22:03.810] – James Kernan
This is basically their slogan or their pitch. We help our customers leverage technology to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make the right decision here’s. The core values in the business company is built on these four pillars trust, integrity, expertise. We got highly technical people, and we care about our community. Many of the people involved in our organization are part of nonprofits and charities in our local community, so we certainly give back.
[00:22:36.330] – James Kernan
We have 100% customer satisfaction guarantee. If you’re not happy and can’t rank us five star service with anything that we do in our services, we’ll come back and do the work for free until you’re happy. Now, this is optional if you want to have something like this, but it gives credibility if you can offer some type of guarantee. The majority of the time, customers don’t call you on anything like this. But this is a customer satisfaction where you’ll redo the work.
[00:23:07.150] – James Kernan
You’re not refunding money. So that’s what the customer wanted to do. Here’s a little bit more about their organization. You just only pick a couple of these things. They’re headquartered in San Diego.
[00:23:18.520] – James Kernan
They acquired a small business back in 2014. They’re part of a national network that gives them capabilities to sell and support their customers all around the country. Up top is a picture of the data center where they have a cloud product. They’ve got six consulting divisions in the organization.
[00:23:43.350] – James Kernan
We don’t want to talk about things that we can do for you. We want to talk about projects that we’ve done successfully. Here’s a couple of the projects that our team members have been involved throughout their career. The San Diego Padres ballpark stadium. We are involved in a $1.2 million Cisco network infrastructure project.
[00:24:06.330] – James Kernan
AMN Health Care. We did a large active directory migration. San Diego City Schools, we did a huge migration in partnering with Microsoft on that project. And also the San Diego Airport, we did their disaster recovery plan. So all of you can say this as well.
[00:24:26.920] – James Kernan
If you think back of projects that you or your team or people that you outsource have been involved with, this one is one in particular as well. Through national distribution, we sell and support over 1700 different manufacturers, like Microsoft or Xerox, Hewlett Packard. These are some of the partners that we have access to in products and services. Here’s the six practice groups that we have as an organization cloud security, mobility, business intelligence, outsourcing or out staffing and document management. And that’s it.
[00:25:04.470] – James Kernan
Okay, so real quick, you just want to go through who you are, how you’re a little different than the competition. Now, that presentation I went through real quick, I hope left you with the feeling like, wow, those guys must be pretty big, and they have an impressive portfolio. It was just an eight person organization, and eight of the people came from different companies. And I can answer any of those bullet points. But the key point I wanted to present to you guys is you want to give as much credibility as you can.
[00:25:40.890] – James Kernan
Good selling and good marketing is making yourself look bigger and better than you really are. Without lying. You want to have credibility. And why would a big organization or someone with lots of money want to spend it with you? You have two employees.
[00:25:57.130] – James Kernan
Why would they want to spend money with you? And I want to challenge you to think about that for a second. And if you think outside the box, meaning, like, all of your capabilities, you as a person, the rest of your team, people that you subcontracted, and then other manufacturers and distributors that you buy from in the supply chain or other resellers around the country that you’re part of a network with, and I can talk more about that at a different time. Just connect with me on that. You can actually present this kind of presentation, and you’d be much more likely to bring credibility to a bigger organization or a bigger project and work on more lucrative things if you can present yourself in that light.
[00:26:42.550] – James Kernan
It depends on the target market. Depends on what you want to do. But that was something that that customer wanted me to help them with. So that’s exactly where we’re at. So I already talked about us for five minutes.
[00:26:55.190] – James Kernan
Now let’s talk about you. I’ve got some questions for you. I want to learn more about your business. Now, I did go to your website. I read that you guys just acquired a company a month ago, and you probably have some technology challenges from that, but you want to have a business conversation with, hopefully, the decision maker or the influencers.
[00:27:19.550] – James Kernan
And typically the very first meeting, you’re probably meeting with the decision influencer and maybe not the decision maker unless you’re lucky. Again, I talked about being prepared in advance and know some things about them personally, so you can kind of connect, like, hey, I saw that you went to Michigan State. That’s pretty cool. All my brothers and sister went to Michigan State. Ghostbartons so you want to try to align with something that you have in common.
[00:27:45.510] – James Kernan
It just makes the conversation much easier. When you’re asking questions, you just want to make sure you’ve got a thorough understanding of what they’re talking about around how they use technology in their business. It either makes them money or saves them money, and it’s always not perfect. So the questions I’m going to show you in the questionnaire form are something that’s important. And the last point I wanted to make is if there’s no pain when you’re talking through these questions, asking questions, taking lots of notes, if they keep saying, everything’s great, everything’s fantastic, we don’t have any problems.
[00:28:24.450] – James Kernan
You’re there for a reason. They’re spending time with you for a reason, and they either may not know it or they’re lying to you. But you need to keep asking good questions. And that’s where you would really try to push for a tool assessment, for you to drop an assessment tool and gather data. Now, if it’s a customer that you really want, say, look, I feel like I’m such a great fit for your organization.
[00:28:49.050] – James Kernan
You’re exactly who fits our ideal customer profile. I’m going to do this for no charge. We normally charge $1,500 for this, but I feel we’re really good fit. It’s going to give me additional data that we haven’t been able to talk about today. And I’m going to offer this to you free of charge if you’re open and willing to that.
[00:29:08.110] – James Kernan
It’ll only take 30 minutes at our next meeting. Are you open to that? So you want to try to offer a paid assessment. If you feel like that’s not going to work, you’re the boss. You can switch it and do a free assessment.
[00:29:24.710] – James Kernan
So I’m not going to read through all of these. I’ve got three pages of questions that you can use, but I want you to start the conversation once you get to this stage. You did introductions. You did about us for five minutes. Okay.
[00:29:41.040] – James Kernan
Now why have you asked me to come here today?
[00:29:45.870] – James Kernan
Maybe you know some things in advance and you talked on the phone and they’ve been having issues with their backups. Besides your backups, is there anything else going on that you guys are struggling with, with technology? I like to have a candid conversation, so I always like it being direct, but I like asking a question like that in the very. Beginning. So why have you asked me to come meet with you today?
[00:30:08.020] – James Kernan
Tell me more about your business. I did some research on you already. I can see you’re a manufacturing company. You just bought another company that you’re blending together about a month ago. You’ve been in business over 30 years.
[00:30:19.810] – James Kernan
But tell me a little bit more about your company. How do you guys make money? That’s a great leading question. That is conversational and we’ll get people talking about. Another one is what are your business goals in the next 36 months?
[00:30:35.010] – James Kernan
And I can promise you this, most of your competitors when they come in there and have a conversation in the first meeting, they’re not asking what the company’s goals and objectives are. They’re just trying to do speeds and feeds on their server and understand what technology they have. They’re not asking business questions. And when you have a business conversation you’re going to position yourself ahead of the competition. Okay so a couple of other key bullet points.
[00:31:01.880] – James Kernan
So you start conversation that way. Take lots of notes and remember, be a good listener. So listen first before you speak and then identify the customer’s decision making process and who else is involved in the decision making tree. I already talked about that. Identify the top pain points.
[00:31:20.400] – James Kernan
Have you had any loss of data? Have you had any downtime? Has there been any issues of slowness or productivity problems or poor morale? You want to kind of understand how that’s impacting the business. The questionnaire that I gave you has questions on that and then identify who the current vendor is and what type of equipment that maybe they have a standard where it’s all Hewlett Packard where it’s all Microsoft or they hate Microsoft and they have Linux servers.
[00:31:51.970] – James Kernan
You want to understand what technology they’re using to run their business, what line of business applications. Okay so this is a little bit of an eye chart and I’m not going to go through this but these are some additional questions that can help you of just gathering the data that you need in order to put a proposal together. Okay. So you can ask some of these as you’re going down. A lot of this stuff I had memorized by the time I repeated it and had done it so many times.
[00:32:21.700] – James Kernan
But in the very beginning I didn’t. And I had a portfolio that I used to always open up. One would have my written notes like this. All the questions on the left and on the right. It was just a blank notepad where I would take notes and I would look at what questions to ask and based on how the feeling was in the conversation you’re not going to want to go.
[00:32:43.030] – James Kernan
Okay. Question number three is you want it kind of fluid and conversational, if that makes sense. And based on what the prospect is telling you that should lead you to the next question. Normally you’re not going to be able to get through all of the questions that I had listed. And I also in the questionnaire, I put different categories, like if they want to just talk about data backup or line of business apps or document management, there are questions directly related to that.
[00:33:15.200] – James Kernan
Okay, so again, just to recap the very first meeting, you want to really try to push for an assessment and gather as much information about the business as you can. You want to get answers on the sales questionnaires as much as possible by just having a general conversation. And it’s important. I am a note taker. I think that’s the way I learned and that’s the way I teach.
[00:33:42.000] – James Kernan
I think all of you should be good note takers in the meeting. Just be careful. Don’t have a laptop, that the lid is up in front of the face, your face, so you can’t have eye contact with the customer or the prospect. If you are a technology guru and you want to do that kind of turn so you can face them this way, but type sideways, if that makes sense. You don’t want to break the energy and the eye contact where if you’re writing things down on maybe an electronic tablet, take notes, but keep good eye contact as often as you can.
[00:34:15.650] – James Kernan
I think that’s really important. You want to really try to understand the challenges. And I’ve gone through this, but these again are what the objectives are in the step three of the sales process. But normally that’s your very first meeting with the prospect. Okay?
[00:34:33.690] – James Kernan
So you get through that. Hopefully they’ll give you an opportunity to either you gathered all the data that you needed on the assessment and they shared what their pain is great. Then you’re ready to go to the next step. If you haven’t identified where their pain is or what they need, then we really need to push for an assessment. And that’s where I would recommend maybe offering a complimentary assessment so you could gather the data and find some type of vulnerabilities that you could use as pain to sell into.
[00:35:03.250] – James Kernan
Okay? When you do that, you gather all the data. Now you guys have what you need to come back in and get ready for the next meeting. So the next meeting is what I call the assessment presentation. And Dan, this is your favorite because this is another PowerPoint.
[00:35:20.440] – James Kernan
So it’s a very short presentation. Again, I like being graphical and sharing pictures and what our findings are. But to me, that’s how the big consulting agencies sell. They sell off presentations and they do very short and concise. But there’s a process to it and I’ll help explain it in just a minute because one of the other handouts that I’ve got for you is the assessment review.
[00:35:49.830] – James Kernan
So the pain, the issues, we’ve confirmed that with the decision maker or the decision influencer. We’re going to talk about that in meeting number two. And then there’s some ideas, what I call a wedge. And in the assessment presentation, I’ll talk about that in a minute. There’s some different ideas from high, medium low.
[00:36:15.810] – James Kernan
Without doing a full proposal, you’re just coming up with general pricing of, okay, we can support you or we can fix this problem for you in this range. And this is what I call boxing them in, or a wedge. You want to kind of box them in and look at the body language as you give them numbers as kind of a trial closed technique to see how they react to it. And normally, if the gap is wide enough, $5000 to $1,500. Because we’ve got a couple of offerings here.
[00:36:44.420] – James Kernan
I want to talk to you about how we could resolve this for you. You can see the body language of the prospect, and you’re like, okay, I’m in the zone. And most of the time, they’re not going to tell you exactly what they were paying before, but if you ask the right questions, you can get a pretty good idea of how they were supporting themselves before and approximately what they were paying. Okay. All right, so here’s the agenda for meeting number two.
[00:37:10.820] – James Kernan
So here is one of the other handouts I gave you. It’s the assessment agenda. Meeting number two, it’s very short and sweet. The very first thing I want to do, I’ll hand out a copy of the agenda. Hey, thanks for letting me come back in.
[00:37:25.110] – James Kernan
I want to first ask, has anything changed since our last meeting?
[00:37:31.410] – James Kernan
You fired your CFO. Okay. It’s kind of important for me to know that kind of stuff, or we’ve just acquired another company and I couldn’t talk about that. I’m shocked and surprised at how many times I’ll ask that question. And people will tell you something huge that can affect or could help or hurt you in the sales process.
[00:37:52.460] – James Kernan
So I always like asking that question first most of the time. Oh, no, we’re good. Nothing’s really changed. We’re just kind of interested to see what you guys have in your assessment. All right, cool.
[00:38:04.130] – James Kernan
So let me dig into the next part of the agenda, reviewing our findings of the assessment. I’m going to do that real quick, and then we’ll give you some recommendations and then we’ll talk about next steps, if that makes sense for you. Okay, sounds good. And I’m back to Dan’s favorite PowerPoint. Same slide, but this time I put the logo here of the company.
[00:38:26.810] – James Kernan
I’m meeting with a company this time called the ABC. And then this is just a legal disclaimer. I normally would never read this, but if we did leave it behind, this is in my template. You guys can keep that in there if you want. All my attorney friends would say leave it in there.
[00:38:45.600] – James Kernan
But regardless if they paid you or not, you want to limit your liability and I think that’s important. So in this assessment presentation, we did an assessment. I’m going to go through the findings of what we found. I break it down into six categories, the network, the servers, your email, backups, power distribution and security. And then we’ve got some recommendations for you.
[00:39:12.300] – James Kernan
That’s what I’m going to go through. This is really important, this slide. All you’re going to do is restate what the issues, challenges and concerns of what you’ve talked about, what you found. You should have a strong understanding by this time of what it is. So you invited us initially to talk about your backups because you’ve been struggling with your backups.
[00:39:34.370] – James Kernan
You did a test restore and you knew you didn’t have all the data. So we’ve identified some things there. We’re going to talk about that, but we found a couple of other issues that are X, Y and Z that I’d like to talk to you about today. Does that sound good? You just want to get buy in and you’re pointing out to them that you understand what their business challenges are.
[00:39:52.990] – James Kernan
That’s the number one point of really this assessment presentation. And then this is where I kind of like the graphical representation. Green is good, yellow is warning, and red is failing. So here’s what our assessment tool found. I’m just kind of giving this is just a couple of pages of what the summary is.
[00:40:16.850] – James Kernan
The executive overview network has had some slowness, but that’s not really a major issue. We could maybe upgrade some switches. The servers are really where some of the issues are and where the slowness is. You’ve already know as part of your project plan, you wanted to replace some of these servers moving forward. So we’ve got some ideas for you there.
[00:40:37.410] – James Kernan
Email is okay. There are some issues with connectivity, but I think it’s more slowness related to number one. And two, I just talked about the backups are really the issues. You’ve had some issues with the backups and we’ve got some recommendations on that power insecurity. So this is kind of a holistic approach and a real simplistic approach of here are the six things that we looked at.
[00:41:03.690] – James Kernan
Here’s what our recommendations are. You can walk through this really quick. The very bottom part here is, here’s what we’re recommending. We’ve got three different options for you. We’ve got our best, kind of the middle of the road, and then our low end offering.
[00:41:18.830] – James Kernan
They start at from 1500 up to $4,000. Does that meet the budget for you? And that’s where you would do a trial close. And you don’t have a detailed proposal yet. You’re just trying to say, hey, we can take care of all these things for you over time.
[00:41:35.830] – James Kernan
Depends on the sense of urgency that you have and the levels of sophistication and compliance that you need. Here’s the range that we have. And then based on the feedback that you get as a consultant. I always like sharing my opinion. We’re going to recommend this $4,000 package, but we’ll talk more about that in detail.
[00:41:55.800] – James Kernan
I just want to make sure that this is in the range. Does that make sense? And normally you’re getting buy end by them nodding their head or saying yes, and then basically that’s the tail end of the presentation. And then, hey, let me talk about our managed service a little bit more. This is the chart that I found best being in the industry for a long time.
[00:42:19.780] – James Kernan
This was an example of something I had gotten from Gary Pica a long time ago. And I like this because it really explains managed services in four quadrants. It talks about proactive technology management, talks about network administration, talks about the reactive services. And if you don’t have a tool in place or you’re not using a managed service provider with tools like we have everything’s reactive. But once we automate things, we can do a lot of the proactive and automation stuff upfront, the network admin stuff that’s not getting done by your current provider, then we can do the reactive stuff.
[00:42:56.710] – James Kernan
But the reactive stuff is much lower down the pipeline because we’re doing part one and part two first. And then the most valuable part is really the technology consulting. And that’s our CIO services, where we’ve got the tools. We want to be part of your annual budget. We want to be part of your decision making.
[00:43:18.550] – James Kernan
But consult with us so we can measure the business impact of any of the technology decisions that you have. Okay. And use us as a sounding board. This part right here is the most important value I think many of you bring to the table is your knowledge, the consulting part. So I kind of liked explaining managed services and that’s how do you have any questions about what we talked about?
[00:43:44.920] – James Kernan
So that’s the end of the presentation and the whole point of us going through those presentations. So we went through meeting one, went through meeting two, wedged them in with what our recommendations are. And it’s important to always focus on selling the problem that you solve, not the product. We’re not selling products. We’re selling solutions to the problems that they have.
[00:44:10.670] – James Kernan
That’s what’s impactful for these prospects. Okay, so here’s another tip I’ll share with you. This happens all the time early in the sales process. It might be before you even qualify the prospect. Hey, James, what’s your price per hour?
[00:44:29.620] – James Kernan
I just need to know what your price per hour is. Well, the answer to that is I don’t know because I don’t know enough about your business. I haven’t asked you enough questions, so I don’t know the answer because I haven’t asked you enough questions is how I would have responded to that. There was one time, so most of the time that’s good enough. And they want to meet with you or at least talk to you on the phone and answer a bunch of your questions so you can get a better understanding.
[00:44:55.610] – James Kernan
And I would always say that until I got through the assessment and I gathered enough data on there where I have a pretty good idea of what we could do for them. And if anywhere in the sales process, if you can’t bring value or what you bring to the table is far more expensive than what they can afford, then qualify out world professionals. We can step back and say no and you don’t want to waste your time. If we’re not providing the right value where they don’t see the value, you would just say, hey, I don’t feel like I’m a good fit for what you’re looking for. You can call company ABC down the street and they may be able to help you out, but try not to give a price per hour because then that will pin you down.
[00:45:41.620] – James Kernan
You’ll make a lot more margin instead of just saying what a published price is. Okay, so a couple of other things I wanted to offer up before I can answer any questions. Be careful to identify your ideal customer in the very get go. Okay? You can see this process.
[00:46:00.120] – James Kernan
This takes some time. It takes time to meet with them and understand more about their business. It takes time to do an assessment or to analyze all the questions and answers that you’ve gathered. It takes time to meet with them a second time and walk through these presentations. So you want to make sure that you’re meeting with someone that you have a strong likelihood of closing.
[00:46:23.420] – James Kernan
Start at the top. We want the decision makers in the room in the first meeting if possible, at the minimum the second meeting. Remember, the quality of your offer equals the quality of your response. If you just have an hourly price list and oh, here’s how we could work with you, you’re not really offering a solution to their problems. You just build by the hour and it means to me that you don’t understand what their challenges are.
[00:46:52.000] – James Kernan
You don’t have any ideas, but you’d figure it out by billing them by the hour. That is a perfect example of someone who’s going to struggle closing a deal unless they are in dire need. And then the timing and the urgency of your contact and the need of the customer. We always want to understand the timeline because that’s going to excel the sales processor or slow things down. Okay, so I walked through the steps three and four of the sales process and it’s really once you get the appointment, what do you do?
[00:47:30.790] – James Kernan
I just walked through that. I gave you all the templates of steps three and four, the agendas, the questionnaire, and both of the presentations that you can use and customize yourself if you want to present yourself that way. I found after being in the industry for so long in 30 years, that’s the best process that I’ve seen that’s most effective in closing deals. Okay. And really the homework I would say for you guys would be the very first meeting.
[00:48:02.180] – James Kernan
So it was step three where you did the general company overview. I think there was about an eight or nine page PowerPoint that I put together for you guys. I would encourage you to customize something for yourself. You’re going to build so much more credibility if you could put a decent customer overview presentation together and try to always do that either yourself or your salespeople. The very first five minutes of the first prospect meeting, you want to ideally bring that up and highlight, hey, I’m here for this.
[00:48:37.670] – James Kernan
We’re going to talk about this. But I can do these other things as well because normally that’s the best time because you’ve got a captive audience to help. Okay, so session four is next week, same time, same Bat channel, and we got a few minutes left. I went through a lot of content. I wanted to kind of open things up and ask if you guys have any questions, go ahead and drop them in chat here or in the Q amp a box.
[00:49:05.560] – James Kernan
So I see one of the questions David had mentioned, can you give an example of how to answer the hourly price question? So yeah, thanks for that, Dave. So I kind of started going down that path, and I think I didn’t finish my thought. There was a time I remember being called on that myself. And they’re like, James, that’s all great, but I need to know what your hourly price is.
[00:49:26.900] – James Kernan
And I said, okay, well, one, we typically don’t do hourly prices because we have monthly services and we offer our services as a platform with a low monthly fee. So it’s predictable, you know, how much it’s going to cost every month. So it’s a monthly fee. It’s not an hourly fee. And normally that will get them.
[00:49:51.320] – James Kernan
There was one time there was boy, I was meeting with the Wicked Witch of the West, I think, and she was like, James, you’re not answering my question. And then I gave her a range. Okay. So I’m back to that wedge technique. I said, well, our service pricing is low as $100 per hour.
[00:50:12.200] – James Kernan
Upwards of $225 an hour depends upon the level of expertise of the professional that we send $225 or our data infrastructure experts, our security guys. The low end would be a level one technician offering more desktop support. That’s the range. But we normally don’t sell like that. We take a combination of our whole team and we bring that as a service offering as a solution to you.
[00:50:40.320] – James Kernan
And we typically charge on a monthly basis. Some project related companies are going to want to know how many hours, and you could put forth a good faith estimate. It will be 100 hours, 200 hours, or 500 hours for a big project. That’s how you would quote that out. But subscription income when you’re doing It support proactive maintenance and reactive maintenance on networks you typically do not want to charge by the hour.
[00:51:08.640] – James Kernan
You’ll make a lot more money and you’ll be much more successful, and you’ll stay stickier with a client if you can package it as a monthly service offering. Okay, so any other questions? Let’s see.
[00:51:22.850] – James Kernan
Do you have the Ayce support or bill separately for contract work? So I think if I understand your question, if I have a maintenance contract for It support with a client and then they’ve got projects, is that what you’re asking? Go ahead and type in Dan. If I’m answering, that all you can eat. Okay, so I do have a spreadsheet.
[00:51:51.670] – James Kernan
Dan email me. Here’s my email address and anybody else that wants it. I have an exercise called the MSP comparison chart, and that comparison chart has column number one. Here’s what the hourly rates would be for clients that have no support contract if they called, hey, my servers down. I need to get out here right now.
[00:52:11.280] – James Kernan
Here’s what they would get. And then there were three offerings. Normally, it’s a remote. It’s like a remote monitoring, where you’re monitoring and automating what you can with antivirus and patches. That’s the lowest offering.
[00:52:27.730] – James Kernan
And then there’s a remote plan in the middle where you get that, but you also get the reactive support if they call into your help desk Monday through Friday, eight to five. And then All You Can Eat would be, of course you go on site and do the work. I will say my opinion real quick. I do not like the All You Can Eat, where you bundle in all the projects as well. I think you should peel out projects.
[00:52:52.930] – James Kernan
Like if somebody is growing you all You Can Eat. Meaning you go on site and you get everything in plan A. B. And C. But if you do have projects.
[00:53:01.590] – James Kernan
If you buy ten new workstations and I need to image them and set them up. Or you need to virtualize your whole environment. Or we’re going to move things into a data center. You want to charge for projects. You don’t want to typically leave that.
[00:53:20.370] – James Kernan
All right, I think I’ve answered the questions. Great questions, guys. Thank you. And travel time is something else, too, in that MSP comparison chart exercise. You could say that you charge travel time and you have a two hour minimum on site and the fee is really expensive.
[00:53:38.410] – James Kernan
But if you have a support contract, then we won’t charge travel time as long as you’re within our 30 miles radius, for example.
[00:53:48.390] – James Kernan
And then there are other benefits, like bringing the price down overall. So you want everybody in some type of maintenance program. So cool. All right, I think I’ve answered all the questions. Questions.
[00:54:03.780] – James Kernan
Thanks, everybody. Email me if you have any questions. And connect on social media. Great class today. Good content and fire up.
[00:54:12.100] – James Kernan
Let’s close some deals. We’ll see you next time. Session four. Take care, everybody. Bye.
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