Hey Limitless Listerner! Who wouldn't love to win more deals in a short time in sales? But how? Is there any framework, how to devise your approach, and before all that, how exactly should you prepare for every new deal? Tune in for an exciting episode on Winning More Deals Faster with Buyer Enablement ft. Nate Nasralla. Nate is the creator of a number of tried and tested frameworks that sales reps can use to enable their champion prospects to sell internally. Nate is also the co-founder of Fluent.io seller enablement platform for sales reps to collaborate with their champions, speak the language of the business they're selling to, and close deals with greater confidence and effectiveness. So, let's dive in!
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Hey all. Welcome to another episode of our Limitless podcast series. I'm Nisha, a product marketed Hippo Video and your podcast host we have with us today Nate Nasralla. Hey Nate, welcome to Limitless. Hey Nisha, thanks so much for having me. It's great to have you here. The pleasures all us. So Nate is pronate of a new school of sales thought, which is selling bit buyers and not for them or at them.
He's the creator of a number of tried and tested frameworks that sales reps can use to enable theirs. Champion prospects to sell internally. Nate is also the co-founder of Fluent.io seller enablement platform for sales reps to collaborate with their champions, speak the language of the business they're selling to, and close deals with greater confidence and effectiveness.
Today, Nate will share his expertise on buyer enablement and how sales reps can use it to their advantage. All right, so onto the questions, and this is a pretty basic question for you. so we're not familiar with sales enablement. What exactly is buyer enablement? Yeah, so buyer enablement is built on the idea that sales reps don't close deals buyers do.
Because if you look at all of the make-or-break moments that happen in the sales process, typically they're happening during an internal conversation. In the buying team, when the sales rep isn't even in the room. And so buyer enablement comes down to this question of ha one, have I built a committed champion in the deal?
who will be there in those internal conversations with their own team? And then two, have I enabled them with a clear and compelling message in the materials to support it so that they can, well keep the deal on track and keep it from blowing up during those conversations that again reps aren't in the room?
Right. And I think the pandemic work from home, remote working, whatever we've called it, has kind of made it more necessary. Oh, most definitely. Yeah. But more necessary and at the same time, more, more possible because a lot more of the review process is happening asynchronously.
A lot more written materials, for example, are shared during the reviewer, the evaluation process on the buyer side. So yeah, I very much agree. And okay, here's my next question. So, convincing a prospect to, trust you or even to listen to you was hard enough. How do you get them to champion you to their team or to their leaders?
You know, does communication style to and et cetera differ here? Yes. So de definitely, well, one, what I would say is just a baseline starting point is there has to be some type of direct incentive for that champion. Oh, there has to be something in it for them that ties them to the deal. It could be maybe a problem that's impacting a certain metric that they are personally responsible for and is tied to their compensation.
that's a very easy one. They could be looking for a path to a promotion there. There could be so many other reasons why that champion wins if you win by closing the deal. And if that's not there, then it's gonna be very difficult to do anything else like build up a sense of trust that you're truly somebody that can help teamwork, that they're better off with you than without you.
Transparency, like they don't have anything to hide. They'll bring you in and give you the full story. rapport of like that feeling of, man, this person just really gets me. They understand me in a way that others don't. So those are all elements that go into building that connection with the champion.
In a way that they're actually going to want to help you with the deal. But that's all built on top of that foundation of incentive. Okay. so at what stage of the sales process do you try to get your prospect to transition from, being just a prospect to a champion? So it starts from the very first conversation.
You are building a champion. you don't just find them in the deal throughout the sales cycle, right? You have to create them and you have to build them, which starts from the first conversation. however, there is a point where you transition into testing the champion to try to figure out, okay, have I truly built the champion?
enough, and so ways that you might test the champion for example, you might assign some action items that are value-added to them to see if they actually follow through. Could be calling a customer reference as an example. And obviously that's gonna come a little later in the cycle. After a couple conversations, you've aligned on the problem, you've established and figured out, okay, what's in it for them?
And then you start to layer in some of these tests later. All right. Okay, so, alright, so after you've turned your prospect into your champion, how do you work with them to, craft that sales journey? What resources do you need to equip with, equip them with so that they can pitch you effectively to their team, you or your service?
Yeah, so one of the, one of the first things that you will start building with the champion is your business case or an executive summary, a value story. There are kind of different words for it, but basically it's the message of like, why would other people inside their company care about this? And especially as it relates to the executive or the quote, economic buyer, the decision maker, or plural decision makers in the deal.
You have to build out some type of message that summarizes what the problem is, and why it's costing them something. Why that should be prioritized once solved there is a payoff or some type of outcome that relates to their job, their metrics, and their incentives, right? And so that is the first thing that you're building up that storyline so that that champion has a good message.
Okay? And it'll be done in written form kind of memo format. Some type of summary that allows them to speak to it or to guide them when you're not around and you're, you're sharing. So that's the first piece. now second, I'm happy to kind of go into some other types of materials and things that happened later in the sales cycle.
Things like mutual action plans or joint evaluation plans. But where it starts is back to this, this first idea of the message of why others around the company should care. Okay? So this is the first idea that they'll pitch to the team, the. The executive summary. Exactly. which all starts with the problem products are only valuable in the context of a problem.
Yep, yep. Makes absolute sense. And so how effective do you think videos are in buyer enablement or asynchronous selling in general? So effective in the sense that they allow you to put some emotion and humanity behind what you're doing because so much of the product feature kind of heavy meat talk track, all comes down to.
actually, let me start over. Can, can you cut this one piece? I wanna, I wanna give you a more thoughtful response here. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, let's keep it natural. Okay. So just say whatever comes to your mind. It's okay. Yeah, so I would say video is effective in the sales process cuz it allows you to put a face behind the product.
There's more humanity and you can build a genuine connection, especially with people that you may not have spoken yet. Two, for example, we've talked about this idea of the champion getting an executive or another decision maker involved. And so when they bring your message to them, when they can see some of the spark and the personality behind the message as well and form a connection, they're more likely to say, okay, I'll take 15, 20, however many minutes and go, go join the conversation with this person.
Right? Yeah. So it's the next best thing to I think a face-to-face. or over, yeah, yeah. Zoom. Does it matter? And of course they can, they can see it on their own time to decide if okay, I wanna schedule something and slot it into the calendar so that we're showing up one-on-one. more synchronously.
Yeah. Awesome. And so how effective is, buyer enablement in shortening the sales cycle? Because I think long sales cycles is one major problem plaguing sales ships. Oh, very much so in central sources, so, yep. Yeah. So one of the primary differences between the perspectives of sales enablement and buyer enablement.
Sales enablement is all about more effective interactions with your sales reps. And if you look at the amount of time, that a buyer will spend engaging with sales reps versus engaging with their own team obviously it's significantly greater. think about all of the touchpoints or interactions that a champion will have with their executive throughout the week versus their ability to get an executive to commit time to show up to a sales meeting with the rep. And you are only relying on the ladder meetings with the. It's gonna be challenging early to get a lot of that momentum and, fast short feedback loops and lots of kind of tightly calendared interactions, but by enabling the buyer with a message when the sales rep isn't there.
Then you can begin to speed up some of those discussions and help the champion interact and engage with the executive. again, in, in times that may already be scheduled standing conversations internally, so it compresses some of the length in between interactions in the sales cycle. Awesome. Okay.
Okay, so this is I'm deviating a little from my enablement here, but do you have a cold call framework that works to keep your prospects engaged through the conversation? Like can you start with something and then you move on to something and end with something else? So, to be honest, I don't do a lot of cold calling and it's maybe a funny thing, but most of my outreach to my career has been over email and LinkedIn.
And I just, I never really mastered the cold call, and I wouldn't, I, I wouldn't consider myself a cold calling expert. Fun fact, the last time I made a co cold call was over a decade ago. Okay. That's surprising. Okay. Alright. In that case, an email framework and a cold email framework. Sure. Yes. So when I'm thinking about a cold email first thing that I want to do is, is tie some type of observation to a short problem statement that makes somebody feel like I just read their mind, like, oh my gosh, how did you know that was going on?
followed up by some type of question that leads to curiosity, cuz what I'm optimizing for is just a response Yes. To start a conversation. And so those are kind of the very like three basic parts of the cold email. I'm also a big fan of mid-funnel emails and frameworks, all the way on down for email through the rest of the sales cycle.
But that's where I'd start at the top of the. Okay. And I believe this would involve a fair bit of research right before you send a cold email. Since you started with, there should be a person receiving your email should be surprised that you've read their mind. So you must have done quite a bit of research before sending that email.
Yeah. Well, it's two pieces, right? It's like the classic relevance versus personalization type debate. I, I think they work together. You need Ann, and it's not an either or type question. But, oh my gosh, they must have read my mind. Is more on the relevant side actually. Meaning you understand this problem in their space so well that by sharing what's going on with other customers, the things that you're solving for them, they're like, yes, that is my problem too. And that is more on the relevant side to smart targeting. A very defined customer persona. versus on a personalization side, the way that I think about that is I have a thing that I would teach my teams called the weird test.
And the weird test is if this email ended up in somebody else's inbox, would it feel totally weird because you're referencing something so personal to that one. That when you combine that with relevance, it's very powerful. And those two things work together to boost replies. Yeah. So nowadays a lot of emails are automated, right?
Like you just use an automation tool, create a sequence, and just via emails. So how do you strike the balance between automation, personalization? So part of it comes down to your market. If you were selling to a named account list of 50 enterprises total versus a highly transactional SMB sale with thousands and thousands of accounts.
Obviously the answer is gonna be different here. You do have to lean more heavily on relevance and automation than personalization, whereas the scales tip in the favor of personalization in removing automation. When you go to the enterprise, right? For most teams, there's gonna be some type of balance in between.
And oftentimes how that balance looks is leaning more heavily into the personalization on the first touchpoint, and then repurposing some of that research either later so you're not con constantly doing fresh, fresh research. Or you are referencing that one email with more of an automated kind of set of follow-ups afterward?
So it comes more upfront, not through the rest of the campaign or the sequence. All right. So it's neither fully personalized nor fully automated. Like you have to switch between the two somewhere in your process. Exactly. Like if you're, if you're somewhere in between. Very small named account list and very large transactional sale.
Your process is gonna fall somewhere in between there as well. All right. Okay. And also cold emails have been used to review since the time of mobile review. Do you think they still work, or do sales tips need to start looking at other, media mediums or avenues of communication like such as LinkedIn or Slack communities where I guess, the prospects hang.
Yeah. Well, it should never be used in isolation, and you should never use another channel instead of email. Right. You want to use multiple channels in sync, reinforcing a consistent message that this is somebody that One you would like to talk to because you have a, a very genuine reason you can help.
And two, you're allowing that prospect to select the way in which they wanna respond to you. So for example I, I get a ton of messages on LinkedIn and I get a lot of dms, and it's very hard for me to actually track and organize things. It's great for kind of social conversations and connections and establishing a face and a name and a voice and, great.
Yeah. But if this relates to something that I need to schedule time for, fit into my calendar, maybe bring my co-founder or another team member into, I'm gonna reply to you on email cuz that's how I manage those types of tasks. so it just gives the preference to the prospects so that they can select the channel that is.
For them, it fits their personality, their work style, so on. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. All right. And so what are some metrics that, sales managers need to track for their team and that sales reps need to track at an individual level? So, a way that I think about metrics. That is a little different from, I don't know, perhaps some teams Okay.
Is momentum. And moment especially as you're doing kind of larger deals, is important because it's the way in which you overcome. Just like, The, the status quo, the same old, same old, right? So momentum is, think about the physics principle. I'll give you kind of like, maybe it's a little nerdy right here, but in physics, momentum is always a product of two different things, mass and velocity.
So mass talks about like the weight of something and the center of of gravity. Now mass in the context of sales, is the decision making weight? are you selling to an executive level or to an analyst or manager level? Obviously the higher up the hierarchy you go, the more mass or weight behind the decision you're gonna generate.
Now the second piece of that is velocity. And in physics, it refers to speed and direction. So in a high velocity deal, buyers are engaging in a greater number of conversations and they're moving down the funnel in less time. So they're moving faster. So you put all those things together. A metric to think about is deal moment which is the level of title you're engaging times, the number of interactions you have with that title times their stage in the pipeline.
So the further down the pipeline, the more qualified they become divided by weeks. And this is like your typical like time and cycle. So to give you an example, if you're talking with a C E O multiple times per week, and they are advancing stages, Inside of two weeks, you are generating a ton of momentum as compared to a deal where you're only interacting with a manager level title.
Yeah. You exchange maybe one message or call every other week. They're very early in your pipeline and it's taken you almost let's say two months to get to that point. Right? Very low, very minimal momentum inside of that. Okay, that makes sense. And that ma brings me to my next question. So how do you get that CEO or executor to talk to you?
I mean, they're so high up. So how do you snag a meeting with them? You always start at the lower level right when you start prospecting. So how do you rise up the rank and get to that level? Well, that's a, it's also a choice. You don't have to start at the lower level inside of the company to begin your prospecting.
Now, you can, and it can be helpful if you need some kind of first and initial conversations to form a point of view on how you can actually help the company and what that executive's priority is. But you can also start by selling directly to an executive by doing things maybe you're listening to podcasts, where they were talking about the company, things that are top of mind for them and earnings call, something that they have shared, what is relevant and what matters to them.
And if you know and you have a point of view on how you can help them, then great. Reach out and engage with them directly, okay. While also engaging with other members in their organization. So you can do both. You can start there. I'm also ha happy to say and kind of talk from the perspective of okay, if you don't have an executive in the deal early on.
I can kind of go back through some of the, well, the buyer enablement principles, right? Yeah. That we were talking about of building a champion and then equipping them with a. Okay. So I have one last question about buyer enablement. So what kind of profiles do you target for champions? Like what like what level of the hierarchy are, are they at usually, like, are they lower level or middle management?
Obviously, I don't think an executive can be a champion, but I mean, if there are exceptions maybe you could elaborate on that. But at what level are they usually in an organization. Yeah, well that's that's actually a good, it's a good question and often a misconception that the executive isn't the champion.
You need somebody else to be. the minimum criteria for a champion is influence. They have to be able to change or put some weight behind the direction. Of the decision. So they may not be the one executing it, but they have to be able to help people think in a way that aligns with the deal. And that is certainly something that an executive can do.
So they meet that kind of minimum bar of influence. Of course. And it'll be a little different as far as kind of other titles go, because sometimes it doesn't always relate to a title. it could be. There is an individual contributor, let's say an account executive who has been with the organization for five years.
They're the longest tenured rep. They are consistently above quota, and they're, how they talk about tooling and what they need to succeed in the sales organization can change to the, the. Direction of how leadership or sales enablement and so on, how they invest in new technology, right? So that could be misleading because the account executive, you would say, well, an individual contributor, they're not in management.
Can they really influence a decision? And in this particular case, they could. Okay, so there's this distinction, right? Like we sometimes sell to the user, but, the person who's who has purchase authority is usually the executive. So which do you think is better to target? Like the user will actually be using the product or someone with purchase authority who would make a better influencer?
Yeah, so they are most times, so this is the most common profile. Okay. They are close enough to the workflow to know the problem in detail, but they are far enough away that they have reached and can influence others. Okay. Who will be signing the contract? Oh, and so it's a little bit of a hybrid.
It's a happy medium. Okay. Happy medium. That's a good term. It is. All right. so Nate this is my final question to you. We are almost at the end of our session. So what are some books or podcasts or newsletters that you recommend to our listeners? Yeah, so one of the books that I, I recently read that I think is a great one is called Think Again by Adam Grant.
And it's a good way to just think about effective conversations that help people consider new ideas or different points of. podcasts that I really love, ones that I find myself listening to 20 VC is a favorite of mine. there are all sorts of topics that are, that are covered in startups.
The other one that I listen, I find myself listening to regularly is in depth. it's put out by a group called First Round Capital, and again, all different types of that go into not just kind of what to do, but how to do different practices as it relates to growing and building c. Awesome. All right.
So, okay. I think that brings us to the end of this episode. thank you, Nate, for those enormously helpful insights on what buyer enablement is and how companies or organizations can implement it for themselves. And I'm sure they'll get cracking on it because, yeah, as you said, it's been extremely useful.
And thank you, listeners, for tuning in today. We'll be doing many more of these podcasts with more such tellers and sales leaders from around the globe. So stay tuned into our upcoming episodes. We are on Apple, Spotify, Google, and also Stitcher. Subscribe to get notified when a new episode is out. Please leave us a review if you are on Apple.
Thanks for listening. Have a great day. Bye. And thank you, Nate, once again for being here. It was great talking to you. Well, thanks again for having me and for listening to everybody. Awesome. Thank you. Bye.