How To Craft A Credible, Executive-Level Point Of View

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Welcome to Lesson 22 of The Purposeful Performer!

Transform conversations into collaboration by building a data-driven point of view that resonates with executives.

When you understand the cause-and-effect relationships behind a company's core metrics, you stop selling products and start solving business problems—the foundation for closing transformational deals.

Total points up for grabs: 25

Time to start turning quality conversations into collaboration

In the last lesson, my friend Nate Nasralla took over The Purposeful Performer to help you upgrade your executive-level conversations during the early stages of engagement with the goal of:

• Building influence by helping buyers think critically.

• Dropping a prospect’s sales resistance to an all-time low.

• Creating a process that’s completely focused on buyers.

With an elevated experience that will feel different to your prospects, you’ll naturally attract and engage the right Mobilizers. Before we can start crafting a Narrative with them (the third, key component of the MINTS framework), you’ll first need to turn your early conversations into a compelling point of view (POV) that matters to them.

That’s exactly what Nate is going to break down for us this week.

First, let me share how the practice of turning elevated conversations (and incorporating their key metrics) created the largest proposal I ever showed a customer—$504M.

Did we win the entire half a billion dollar prize?

No, but we did end up closing a $6.6M deal, which happened to be my biggest deal of that year and put me over the 7-figure earnings mark with five months left in the year.

I had come off a strong year prior, so I had the trust of our EVP of Sales, Manlio. He put me on the opportunity when he was approached by the account's EVP of CX. They were a top global telco and wanted to launch a new (low priced) mobile brand.

I won't bore you with the details of winning that initial deal, but we got a small six-figure deal done in Q1 2019 to support the launch of that mobile brand. I do want to point out that I couldn't have closed that deal without partnering well with Rick, the head of our Gainshare at the time.

Because we needed to move fast, and they wanted outcomes, not managing new software, we effectively leveraged Gainshare (our Managed Services business unit) as a key driver for accelerating the deal. That helped us to land an MSA (Master Services Agreement) so that we could become an official supplier to the company.

We agreed that the mobile brand's deal would be a POC (proof of concept) for us to expand into their mainline cable business.

With the MSA on our side (albeit after some tough negotiations with their procurement team) and the ability to better control the outcomes because they were hiring us on performance, our chances for a large expansion were strong.

We made our case using their data

Because we were running their entire CX program for the mobile brand, which launched successfully, we earned significant trust with their EVP, who was the sponsor, and we were making a name for ourselves across their C-Suite.

Because I also linked up and worked well with Rick and the entire Gainshare team, a lot of the burden was lifted from my shoulders. Rick forged a more meaningful relationship with the Mobilizer (and sponsor), because he was seen more as a peer to him than me ... and I was entirely ok with that!

Holding onto your ego will only diminish your commission checks.

With a solid foundation of trust in place, visible creativity and innovation on display, and good early results in hand, we had momentum on our side to expand into the parent business.

This is where we deployed strategic design thinking into the sales process.

Through the strong relationships we forged with various stakeholders (end users all the way up to the executive team), we were able to gather the key metrics that mattered to formulate our proposal.

Using this data, we were able to showcase how their customer support phone calls were costing them nearly $200M a year JUST ON LABOR!

We also knew they were outsourcing their customer service labor across multiple BPOs (Business Process Outsourcing) globally and primarily using voice calls as the channel to resolve customer support issues.

The case before us was to prove that switching from voice calls as the primary customer support channel to messaging will drive down costs, increase the efficiency of the agents (because they wouldn't have to handle one call at a time, especially when we introduced automation and AI), and improve the customer experience (because let's face it, who wants to wait on hold?).

We simply laid out the facts (even though they were huge numbers)

Now with their key metrics and actual data in hand, we could work backwards to build our case.

We understood clearly what they were ultimately trying to achieve—“champion challenge” their voice BPOs so they weren’t so dependent on costly outsourced labor while also delivering a better, more modern customer experience than their competitors.

Like a litigator in a courtroom presenting an effective case, we simply used the facts—theirs and ours.

‍Their numbers just happened to be really large, but the case would have been no different if it was $2M a year or $2B a year.

Starting with the $198M annual labor cost problem as our starting point, we laid out just a handful of slides with our facts:

• CSAT is higher with messaging than voice calls

• Messaging + AI provides up to 25x efficiency

Then we laid out the suggested path forward:

• A three year view of the savings ($90M in total)

• A phased approach to achieving it

• A simple technical illustration showing how the integrations would work

The total proposed cost to the customer (and revenue to us) was $504M over three years.

But to them, it was like locking in $90M less than what they were paying currently.

The end result?

There was no real dispute on the numbers we presented. The $198M labor-only annual cost we presented was very close to their real number.

We ended up moving forward with a single use case with the intent to champion challenge one of their largest voice BPOs before expanding further.

The deal was for $6.6M and, as I mentioned earlier, was my largest deal that particular year. Overall, it was an eight-and-a-half month total sales cycle from meeting them for the first time in December 2018, to closing the large deal in Q3 2019.

The best part ... we now had a stake in going after a nearly $200M a year budget.

Now, Nate is going to break it down so these types of deals aren’t outliers for you—they’re the norm.

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