Transcript
When you start working on enterprise level opportunities, you’re probably going to be talking to more than just one person, and oftentimes that’s going to be an executive and maybe even the CEO or owner of the company.
If you don’t know how to speak the language of executives, you will literally talk your way out of huge opportunities. I wanna help you avoid that. So these are five things that you should keep in mind when you are going after giant opportunities.
Let’s get into it.
Over the past 10 years, I’ve done a lot of business to business consulting. I’ve done workshops, sales training, trade shows, you name it, I’ve done it. I’ve been brought in by BP to speak with the president and the entire executive suite. I have worked with CEOs and founders of companies to help them pitch their value to investors.
For four years, I’ve worked at one of the country’s largest marketing agencies, talking business with CEOs and executives at multimillion and billion dollar companies to negotiate very large deals.
One of my mentors was an executive at Sharp Electronics that took the company from making 📍 millions per year into📍 billions per year, and he has laid out a lot of this for me, and I want to share this with you. so that you can level up your business.
To that end here is the first thing,
which is
zoom out
as a subject matter expert. You are really, really good at managing the details that you need to manage to do your job and accomplish your goals. But that’s why you’re being hired, is to manage those details.
The people hiring. You don’t need to know those details. If you get into the nitty gritty details, well then it’s going to be too fine for somebody who isn’t a subject matter expert to understand what in the world you are talking about. They will very quickly be thinking, why do I even care about this?
So You’re talking to people who are big picture and visionaries more so than granular level KPIs and metrics and that kind of thing. Those come later, but when you are trying to explain how you’re going to help the company, getting too lost in the weeds will make sure that they lose track of why they should hire you.
The second thing that you have to nail is being confident. Business is challenging, it is difficult. It can be even brutal. And the executives, the CEOs need to know that they can depend on you when things are difficult. So when things are easy, when you are in the negotiation phase. The conversation about how you’re going to help them.
They might test you, they might push back, they might press in on some particular detail that you wish they wouldn’t, and they’re going to see how you hold up to the smallest bit of pressure. You might think that that was unnecessary and unreasonable, or they were being mean. They were basically just testing how confident you were in, how well you can execute at this level.
So if you fold, when they give you the slightest bit of pressure, they know for sure that they cannot trust you with the full weight of the success of their business. And that is one way that you can lose the opportunity is if you get flustered or you snap at them when they’re testing your resolve. So the right thing to do is to remain confident,
support your claims and to stand by your work and to weather that pressure. And then you might find out that, uh, you passed the test.
The third thing to keep in mind is to focus on value. Companies are a creature that live on profits and are hurt by liabilities. Not just making money and losing money, but employees can be liabilities. Debt can be liabilities. There are all sorts of liabilities that a company is facing, and the CEO is the partner of the company who wants the business as happy as possible with as few liabilities as possible because their payday is tied into the value of the company, not just their paycheck.
So the CEO and the executives are tied into how comfortable and happy the business is. That means that at every stage of the conversation, every detail that you are explaining, you should be able to then say, and that helps improve the profits or lowers the liabilities because this, this, and this.
So you should be able to say that if we run more effective Facebook ads, then we will be able to increase your exposure for the same ad spend. So that is more results with the same investment, which is more profitable, right? So when you speak the language of value, you’re speaking the language of executives.
The fourth thing is to extend your time horizon, focus on the long term. You might want to talk about the immediate wins, and we’re gonna do this tomorrow, but. CEOs are in it for the long haul. They have a long-term vision for what they want the business to be, where they want it to go and what they want to do.
Maybe that is to make it as profitable as possible and sell to investors in three years. Or maybe it is to retire by the time that they are 40, or maybe it is, they’re building this business to provide for the next three generations of their family. That’s how long term that they are thinking, and you can figure out how to fit into that vision by helping focus on, I’m helping you today.
For tomorrow’s benefit into perpetuity. So when you extend your time horizon, you are helping them envision a longer and longer partnership instead of, here’s what I’m doing today. It’s more of we’re going to work together for the long term because we both have the same goal, which is helping make your business successful.
The fifth detail is know how your puzzle piece fits into the company. Another way of saying this is:📍 know your place
now, I mean that to say. See how you fit into the whole picture. Not to stay quiet because if you understand branding and marketing and sales and onboarding and delivery and client retention and business systems, you are bringing a lot more value to the table when you are still talking about your particular area of expertise.
When you can think strategically at a long-term vision, you’re a consultant who is a business expert with a, with a focus in your area of expertise. So that is how you’re going to be in. incredibly valuable to that company beyond just the level of skills that you’re bringing to the table for the thing you want to be paid to do.
So when you know how you fit in, you can be even more valuable to the company and that translates to higher pay.
So those are the five things. Zoom out, be more confident, speak the language of value, extend your time horizon, and know how you fit into the whole picture. When you bring all of those together, your sales conversations are gonna go much more smoothly and you’ll land many more opportunities.
Now, if you want more insights like this, I strongly suggest that you join my almost daily email society. I call it the secret email society because nobody else can see what happens inside of it. And I share tips, tricks, techniques, and strategies for, uh, landing more business of bigger and better quality. Uh, you can do that at I can read minds.com. And again, I’m Jonathan Pritchard, and remember, if you can change your mind, you can change your life.
