🚪Ask for forgiveness, not permission
Ricky guided a deal with one of the biggest companies in the world.
From a cold, generic email to a $100 million contract in 3 short years (haha).
Navigating endless buying committees, constant turnover, & strict covid protocols.
Ricky managed to land the sale without ever meeting the final decision-makers.
Guest Feature
Ricky Pearl joined us from halfway around the world in Melbourne, Australia.
An entrepreneur to the core, he's spent his career growing businesses from the ground up.
Currently CEO of Pointer, a Sales-as-a-Service company.
Helping companies build top-of-funnel & sales development functions
Deal details
What are you selling?
- A hardware product with a very specific purpose: help them meet certain security standards.
Where did the prospect come from?
- A huge researched list that Ricky built himself.
Company type
- A third party data center with one one tenant: as massive global brand.
- Ricky is dealing directly with the third party, but the tenant has a ton of say.
Prospecting method
- Generic cold email to a big list that hit the right nerves.
Barriers to Overcome
- Internal: Couldn’t prospect with his company’s strict systems. Had to create a solution.
- External: multiple global stakeholders from tenant company that Ricky did not have access to.
- Committees reporting to committees.
- Covid blocked the ability to meet in-person around a physical product.
Buyer type
- Decision Maker: committees within committees
Deal length
- 3 years. Ricky was the only constant on both sides of the deal.
Episode Highlights
Note: timestamps correlate with the full conversation
Research: List building for a new product offering (3:57)
Prospecting: SDR misses the target? 95% of the time it’s not their fault (12:14)
Demo: Selling product weakness to highlight strengths (25:44)
3 Tips for Account Executives
1. Multi-thread to the point you've found yourself on their buying committee.
Make yourself an invaluable part of their decision making process.
2. Map out every aspect of their decision-making process.
Especially when your dealing with multiple buying committees.
3. Motivating factors aren't always growth. Often it's risk avoidance.
People can be more motivated to avoid risk than to gain something.
Watch the full conversation
Full transcript
Taylor Dahlem
Welcome back to How I Deal, where we discuss past closed one and lost deals, how they played out that way and provide some hopefully useful actionable sales tips that you can use in your deals today. My name is Taylor Dahlem, full cycle account executive turn content guy and I'm joined as always by my co-host, Junior Lartey, The real sales brain here at Pickle. What's up, June?
Junior Lartey
Good dude. Onto episode fourteen. Super ready for this conversation. Just a quick heads up to the listeners. This deal is intense, really pay attention. Give it a second. Listen, we're going to try to take it pretty slow.
Taylor Dahlem
Yes, we want to make sure we're diving deep. And just to refresh on this conversation, in case you're listening for the first time or haven't listened for a few episodes, just for everyone to remember each conversation, we chat through a single pass deal. We want to keep all names, places anonymized fictionalized that way, like I said, we can dive really deep and that's what we want to do on this episode. So all the way from the first time this prospect was encountered, whether through a targeted list, your LinkedIn, perusing, anywhere you find your prospects, all the way to getting this deal completed and the dotted line signed.
Junior Lartey
So our guest today is Ricky Pearl. He's joining us from halfway around the world in Melbourne, Australia. Ricky is an entrepreneur to the core. He's spent his career growing businesses from the ground up. Currently CEO of Pointer Sales as a service company. Ricky, we're really excited to have you give us some insight into your role and the problems that Pointer solves.
Ricky Pearl
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Yes. So I've set up Pointer. We essentially help companies that need help building that top-of-funnel function, that sales development, business development, where either they do not want to have that function in-house or don't have the capabilities yet to build that function in-house and drive it through to success. We help companies get that done for them, but broadly, it's just an avenue for me to play in sales and do what I do, which is sales and love doing for other people.
Taylor Dahlem
Absolutely. Yeah. It's hard to get away from sales if that's the true calling. I think all three of us agree that's the rest of our careers, that's for sure. But Ricky, let's dive right in. What deal are you walking us through today?
Ricky Pearl
All right, so the deal I want to talk about is a pretty large deal around selling of a physical product. So not the typical SAS that you might have on here. However, it was selling to the company in the assassin's world and involved a security product which they needed to facilitate their business. A lot of these companies have security standards that they have to meet and this was one of the products that helped them achieve the security standards.
Junior Lartey
Sweet. I don't know that we've tapped into this specifically. So should be a really fun one to go through. So for our listeners, last time I'll mention this, but we're really trying to help reps identify the difference between awareness research and prospecting. Awareness, right, is where you heard about the company. The research is what info you're able to find before you reach out. And then prospecting, of course, is when you actually reach out. So Ricky, where did the awareness come from and what research was conducted here?
Ricky Pearl
This was a very high-level strategic approach that we took. We were taking a new security product, entering new markets. That's the role that I had with Pointer, which was opening up APAC. So we identified which kind of professionals needed this product on which kinds of projects. And we thought at that stage, everyone who is a professional in this space would want to know that this product with this capability exists. And we built lists. So I built a massive list of everyone who would possibly want to talk to in this space and with the intention of in the long run also focusing on a project basis, like, who needs this now? But at this stage, with this deal that we're talking about, it was still super high level, just like, list of security professionals in this industry.
Junior Lartey
So it's a high-level list of people, but the actual like, vertical that you're going into, you know, that you can tackle and like, there's proven, I guess, pain there that you know, you can solve.
Ricky Pearl
Yeah, absolutely. It's a pretty generic product as far as security goes. Like, let's just say we're talking about a door. You need a door that can withstand being kicked one hundred times. Who needs that? Well, anyone who needs a high-security door. Who needs high-security doors? There's global standards, prisons, government offices, I don't know all of those kinds of places. Well, this is who needs high-security doors. This is who we can sell high-security doors to. So it is really simpler than you think, saying airports need high-security doors or at airports are vertical. And what about police stations? They need the high-security tool. Or at police stations there's a vertical. And so we went. But it is really that broad that the list is at this stage. Ten thousand individuals and we're still in a single country.
Junior Lartey
Ricky, you rattled those off pretty quick, the high-security doors. You went straight to the prisons I'm starting to sell, or starting to think maybe you sold some high-security doors to prison. Great analogy.
Ricky Pearl
No, not the case. But I just wanted to make it tangible around a physical product that has a use case that is not everyone. It's not like a normal door. Well, every house in the world needs a normal door. It is still within a niche. But that niche is broad enough that there's a big total addressable market.
Taylor Dahlem
Let's move to the next step.So you've done the awareness part where you're building that list, you're doing the research. It is a tangible door like we're talking about, but not just any door, high-security door. So there is that persona, that pain point, that understanding of what is needed when and then in particular at this point, the prospecting side when your initial outreach, and we talk about this all the time, but there's full sales podcast dedicated to just prospecting. So this will just probably be really a tap or just looking into a pure sliver of what all happened and how it went down. But how exactly did you get in front of this prospect in particular? What are some of the details there?
Ricky Pearl
All right, I'm going to partially incriminate myself here. Not actually incriminate.
Taylor Dahlem
Prison doors are back.
Ricky Pearl
Yeah, I know how to break into prison doors one hundred and one times. We had some super strict criteria within this company how to call people, what to do. And I'm sitting here on a list of ten thousand people and I've only built up like one small country within APAC, one small vertical. I'm like, this is going to be impossible, right? So I set up my own and I'm sure a lot of salespeople do this. I set up my own systems. So here I am, I'm setting up a sales engagement platform because this cannot get done through this company server. There's no way. So here I am registering a new domain that looks like the company's name, right? I'm going full hog here so that I can actually prospect and do my job. Because I know if I don't get these deals, I get fired. If they find out that I do this, I'm going to get fired. But at least if I do it and I succeed, everyone wins, right? Like, maybe this is better. Ask for forgiveness and permission. To be fair, I did ask for permission and it didn't say no. So I was like, I'm just going to take that as the very particular shade of gray that I'm going to operate within. So I set up my own sales engagement platform and I start called outbound. The list is big enough that I need to prioritize email over phone calls. And I'm just waking up every morning to replies. Thanks, Ricky. Yes, happy to meet. No, don't want to meet. And so I'm like on target. I'm booking the meetings I need seems are going well. This deal, it happens to be, I think, the third or fourth email that I had sent to this individual. Obviously this is automated. I don't actually send the emails and I just get a wake-up to respond saying, hey, Ricky, so sorry, I've just been super busy. I'm happy to meet with you next week, Tuesday. This is actually pretty good timing. Wow, great. That was it, right? So that's how this all started cold prospecting while start sleep while doing some nefarious activity using the techniques the company might not necessarily approve of.
Junior Lartey
Yes. Okay, so a couple of things within their one, Kaumana and I came homeowner is one of the co-founders of Pickle. Me and him have talked. If we were to go to a different company that didn't have resources, there are certain tools that I would pay out of pocket for because of the value return. One of those being like LinkedIn sales. Nav. I can literally almost do my whole job with just LinkedIn SalesNav. But for you, obviously, you went out, you automated, you built your own process using an engagement tool. But the thing I want to focus more so on is you're getting email responses. I'm just curious, are these email responses due to the mass amount of people? Is it because the pain is so prevalent and it's unsolved? Why are so many people responding?
Ricky Pearl
This product had good fit. First of all, I think that's important to say that if we just look back at doors keep with that analogy. I'm the strict NDA's with this one. So if you are a security professional and responsible for installing doors within prisons, then you're going to be interested when somebody says, hey, have you seen the latest doors? You might not want to buy. But as a professional in that space, you need to be on top of what technology is available, what tools are available, what's the current motoranda for the current threats and risks that professionals that are being faced? So we just went out with an education piece. We'd love to introduce you to this new product, XYZ. Using it. Are you interested in why? We'd love to show you some time. As simple as that. If you had to come to me as a sales agency and say, we've got a new CRM, this is what it does, this is how it helps you. I'd be interested. Even if it's not to use even if it's not to use, even if it's just to reaffirm my current decision, I'm still interested.
Junior Lartey
Yeah, it's just perfect product market fit, right? So I'm just thinking, okay, if I'm an account executive and I feel like Ricky's getting a ton of responses, but I'm not, it's not necessarily the useful. I just want our listeners to know.
Ricky Pearl
I run an SDR agency. Right. And I am of a firm belief that if an SDR is not on target, ninety-five percent of it is not his fault. And it would be the same with the prospecting for an Ae. Ninety-five percent. It's messaging. All right, well, that's a marketing problem or it's delivery. That's a technical problem. If it's effort, they're not putting in enough effort. Okay, maybe it's the BDR, but most people are burning themselves to the core with effort. Everything else is someone else in the team that needs to be weighing in. There absolutely this product happens to be good, happened to be bloody excellent. But we do have other campaigns in general. You still just got to find what is that angle that's going to get you the response. In this case, it was education, but there are different ones that you need to plug in, different benefits to the individual.
Junior Lartey
Perfect. And you wrapped it up really nice there. So at this point, he's responded to the cadence. You've got a meeting booked, it's game on. Tell us about the Discovery experience and what you learned in Discovery to help you kind of steamroll the deal or at least get yourself a win to demo.
Ricky Pearl
Well, firstly, discovery was incredibly long. I just need to paint a picture on the decision-making framework here. First, to try to put this all into perspective. The person I'm now talking to, we would call the client. They own the facility being built, but they are building it on behalf of another company who's going to tenant it. And this tenant is the only tenant at this facility and the biggest customer for this client who's building this facility. And so the tenant themselves actually have a lot more say than this client. Because if that's when it says jump, this client says, how high? But I'm dealing with this client on top of that, this client is just the money behind the build. They're going to put it onto another building company who will have a design and contract to build the facility. Actually, the decision to make it can say yes or no to everything. Land up, paying the checks, signing the contracts, signing the deals. So that's the complex framework. I'm now talking to the clients on this call. With the clients, they bring in two security consultants, one for them and one for their tenant. So this is the first call, like this first introductory disco call. And what has happened, I discover is that the tenant has signed with this clients to build this facility within that process. Like somewhere in the six months that since they've signed, a tenant has upgraded their security standards. And now they're saying to their clients, we need you to change your security standards at this facility or we can't be tenants in there anymore. And the standards are like, shit, right? This is a spanner in the works. So my email happened to hit his inbox at the right time. We could call it dumb luck, I just call it the lack of scale. But I happened to find the right person at the right time and this is what I discovered. He has to they have to change their standards away from what they were doing a lot closer to what we offer. So straight away, we are in with a good shot here. Either they will be using our product or a competitors product exactly like ours, but they are now in the market for a specification like this.
Junior Lartey
And the client is saying, we have to do these security upgrades because we don't want to lose the tenant.
Ricky Pearl
Yeah, right. Absolutely. That's exactly what they're doing. The tenant did still give them a few options of how they could achieve it, but of those few options, this was quickly highlighted as the most beneficial and the most economical. That's why they have to do it. They've got this client of theirs who's going to be tenant this facility, and this is their biggest clients, that if they don't make happy, they lose their clients, which would be devastating to their business. So this client has said, we want this to change, although they've already contracted, although they're already halfway through a deal, they kind of have to say yes.
Junior Lartey
Yeah, because they're already six months into this. So to lose, well, for you to lose the client would really suck. But the client themselves, to lose this particular tenant massive impact to the organization, devastating.
Ricky Pearl
Absolutely. And they couldn't. Right. So it was a given. They are upgrading to this tenants new standard. But the tenants very cleverly because they have really, really robust global procurement standards, doesn't say, hey, you have to buy from Ricky, he's our supplier. They say, you need to buy for use this door analogy, the door that looks like this and feels like that and operates in this particular way and can achieve this general outcome. They keep it very loose and vague so that they are not hard specifying a supplier, so that they are allowing a competitive process, so they define an outcome rather than a product. There's still a lot of work here to prove that we can meet this outcome, because these procurement standards are designed quite specifically to avoid corruption, to avoid preferred suppliers winning deals, to avoid a whole host of bad app elements that go into procurement. And we now have to navigate this in a very challenging way because we've got a client who has really robust standards and operating. You could imagine if you build billions of dollars worth of facilities for a client who has even more billions worth of dollars to pay for these things. There are layers of procurement processes, layers of bureaucracy, layers of decision-makers that are so thick that as a small business, to try, integrate and navigate was a challenge. So as we're going through discovery, they are just layering on, yes, there's a need that's interesting, that was so basic, that was like the first five minutes. Now they start bringing in the complexities of this need. So you may be up. Technically, it's still in discovery, is still trying to learn and understand what it is that they need to solve this problem. But what they need isn't just a product. They need a product that can be delivered in such a way with this kind of guarantee, with these kind of warranties, with this kind of contract agreements. Like their requirements are so thick that it was overwhelming.
Junior Lartey
Yeah. Okay, Taylor, before you jump in with your next question, I just want to take a quick pause. AES that are listening, go back to the last five minutes, I don't know, two minutes, however long it's been, and just listen to the way that Ricky talks about this deal. You can tell that he is like, such an intricate piece and part of the discovery, he understands it so well. So when you walk out of your discoveries, like, think, could I go and explain this to a friend in a way that they will understand just the pain that my prospects have? Okay, Taylor, go ahead.
Taylor Dahlem
Yeah. So Junior kind of prefaced that concept of multiple discovery meetings, deeply understanding the problem. You really can't move forward until that happens. But at some point something has to happen. Either we're walking away from the deal or let's move forward. What's the next step? Typically in the software SAS world, you're selling to a SaaS client here or a software client. But most of our listeners, it's a quick demo, one meeting, typical software demo, we're just showing off the platform. But here it's a physical product. We're talking about the doors back to that analogy, but some similarities, but a ton of differences.
Ricky Pearl
Right.
Taylor Dahlem
So understanding the pains that you picked up throughout discovery and the problem that you're addressing, how are you kind of fitting in that shoehorn door, your door in particular has the perfect solution. But more importantly, how do you just not get lost along the way with all of those different decision-makers and individuals that you met with?
Ricky Pearl
We are having to drive this now because the one thing I realized is in this new specification, this client that we are now working with doesn't know a lot. This is new to them. And that was my opportunity. I could be an advisor, a consultant. I could help hold their hand through this process and make sure that they're giving their tenants what their tenant want, because that is ultimately what they were trying to achieve here. They didn't care. They were happy with their old specification. The old specification was cheaper. So all they're trying to do is make their client happy. Who's going to tend to this facility? So I helped them achieve that. I realized very quickly this is what I need to do. So I'd ask them the question, hey, I know you're changing to this specification, but are they interested in A or B? And my client, obviously, I don't know because this is new to me. So I can help them go back and say, hey, we worked in this. Do you want A or B? And I'd be that's actually a very good question. We haven't considered this yet because this is a new upgraded specification for us too. And all of a sudden, through the questions that I could ask, I was changing the way that everyone was thinking about this product because they've all just upgraded it conceptually to an outcome that I am the experts in. That is like where the momentum for this deal started to shift, was in the way I could ask questions that made them deep down feel like I don't know the answer. I'm so happy Ricky knows the answer. He's asking this question and he's just given me both options. And now he gave me a third option. He told me why option A is the best. Let me take this back to the Tenant. They were fully empowered just through our discovery process to refine their spec.
Junior Lartey
When you're going go ahead, Taylor.
Taylor Dahlem
I think we mentioned this off air, but we were talking about the timing of this conversation too. That made it a little more complex. I don't know if you mentioned it, but it was kind of in the middle of two thousand and twenty, right or middle of covet. That threw in some complications. Even more so for a physical product where most of the time they're looking, touching, feeling.
Ricky Pearl
It's like watching a cooking show. Yeah, that was it. It's like selling food by watching a cooking show. We're like, look at this, look at this beautiful door. Obviously that's not enough. These are absolute industry professionals, top of the game. The company is we're working with hired excellent people who made good decisions. So I had to do this demo process. And this was at a stage of clover that the service canal was blocked. I couldn't even shift product for them to feel. So this whole deal is going on, right? They can't see this product, but they have to deliver. They kind of understand now they're making a decision. This is the reality they are in. But having to convey this trust in the product virtually was a whole new skill. And we have to bring in social proof or technical proof or some other way to help convince them that this wasn't a sales pitch. That we are over-exaggerating or overstating. We have to be able to approve in some way every statement that we made. And that was like a real unique thing, having to build trust remotely, but then also having to build trust vicariously. Because at this stage, I haven't spoken to a single person at the tenant. No one. I don't even know who it is. All I know is it's like one of the biggest companies in the world. And from the feedback I'm getting, I've got lots of questions, lots of bureaucracy, lots of like, different ways of doing things. It's not going to be easy to influence them, but I've never met them. This was like a layer of demo that really set me up for learning how to build trust quickly, but not through personal rapport and personal relationships, but showing trust in that product. And very often that was about talking about the product's weaknesses. If I say, hey, my door can withstand one hundred kicks. People are like, okay, that's nice. If I say, look, if you kick the store one hundred and one times it will fail, that's blatant. Like, that's honest. You believe that because we have those negative buyers. So if I tell you the store will break on one hundred and one kicks, but it won't break before you're like it's believable. But if I say no, this store can withstand one hundred kicks, kicks as hard as you want, one hundred times won't break this. It's harder to believe. I'm saying the exact same thing. One's believable, one is not easy to believe. And I have to learn to do that pretty quickly on these things to build trust. And I've carried that with me moving forward. Like talk about the weaknesses and people will believe it. Talk about the weaknesses in a way that highlights the strength.
Junior Lartey
That'S a mastercraft, honestly, a true Mastercraft, to be able to do that. Ricky honestly, this whole deal seems like nothing but a barrier, a barrier for your client because now they have to upgrade a barrier for you, like selling into covet and then trying to get your grass on. There are so many decision-makers and layers here. So just talk about some of the barriers, some of more of the major barriers, if you will.
Ricky Pearl
So a few of the big barriers, right. So as you mentioned, we started with the barrier of I couldn't even prospect given my company's strict systems. Like everything has had to be overcome. The big barriers now were multiple stakeholders. I'm talking like the tenant had a committee, our clients had a committee, the end builder who was going to essentially give us the contract, who would have been our clients had a committee. And these committees have come together to form committees. So there's like committees reporting into committees, reporting into decision-makers. Mapping out the decision-making process was extremely difficult. Then understanding the paper process that was going to be on the back of it, extremely difficult. On top of that, mapping out the system requirements were difficult because it was a moving feast. But what happened over time was because there was this adviser helping drive this deal forward. I think your name, their mind, they realized, bear in mind they still have a deadline, they still have to deliver an outcome. I think they realized the only way to get there was with me rather than by themselves. And they didn't even entertain bringing on a competitor because if they were then trying to, they would have to be in the driver's seat to push two competitors against each other, but they didn't even know where to push. That started putting us in the driver's seat and changed momentum. And then there was a lot of position movement. This is a three-year deal, enterprise clients, where people are moving jobs every two months, every three months, every six months, or staying at the company just moving on to a different portfolio. By the end of this like one year in I'm the last man standing. Like everyone's new on this deal barring a few people and they were saying we get to meeting and I would be saying look we met on this topic three months ago. John, who's now since moved on was leaning towards specification A. Peter who's also now moved on was leading towards specification B and this is the document that we now need to review to make a decision in between those two. Here I am driving that I'm the supplier, this is not my job. I don't get to pay these top-dollar consulting fees. Give that to me on top of it. But those things started shifting momentum when I realized I was no longer a supplier. I'm now part of the team trying to deliver a product and deliver an outcome and really that will change. So in my mind halfway through this deal, like a year into this deal, the deal was done in that they wanted to use our product and it was mine to lose. Things still could have blown it up. Like global supply issues with covert. The companies could just change their strategy. We're not building this facility anymore, we're putting it on hold for two years. All of these things could still happen but provided all of those things which were completely out of my control, not occurring in this deal moving forward. It was one hundred percent mild to win or lose.
Junior Lartey
I want to pull you back to where you were saying people were transitioning in and out of the deal. I think the really big lesson there too is that the people, especially in this instance were not the problem. The problem was going to exist whether the people were transitioning jobs or not. And the solution, they needed a solution and because you understood so well had driven the whole process really dove into discovery. It didn't matter who came into the driver's seat because you could bring everyone up to speed. And the problem was not the people, the problem was the situation.
Ricky Pearl
And the more you get into enterprise I think the more you'll find this is the case. Like that transactional sale can be personality based. I've got on with Peter, that's why I want to buy from Peter. This was a big corporate problem that needed a big corporate solution. No one person in fact if you had to ask these companies who makes the decision? They wouldn't even tell you convoluted no one person was bigger than this outcome and everyone just had to work towards the right outcome and trying to do like really difficult things. The companies that are pushing these boundaries, they've set up these processes for a reason. They're not there because they want bureaucracy. And that's what you need to understand to get that one layer behind why are they making decisions. This way. Often it's risk avoidance. They want the best decision and having more people involved in that decision will produce the right decision, which ultimately better. If you compile and compound good decisions on top of good decisions on top of good decisions, you end up getting the best outcomes. That's how good companies win. I care for people making good decisions to do good things. So they've set up the system. That way I can't circumvent their process that they've built. I just have to leverage it and work within it to achieve a good outcome. So I just became and they never appointed me yet I just became a member of their committee. Use my product or not, I'm going to help you get this outcome that you want. I happen to think the right solution is my product. But at any stage if you find out it's not that there's a different one, no problem. Absolutely no problem. Obviously I'm close to the action and I can still help influence the topics at this stage. I'm sending a better agenda at these meetings. So it was never going to be another product. But I think, yeah, that is just so cool to it. There was no one person. The very first person once put on a really great South African accent and we connected straight away on the back of that. Like just some quick rapport building and maybe that helps getting from that first email through to disco. But other than that I happen to be lucky or happen to have good report with one individual after that. This could have just been this was by and largest names on an email list. And I'm talking about big email list and like thirty people on email chains backwards and forwards. I don't know half of these people.
Junior Lartey
Let me ask you a quick question before we transition. Are you still close friends with people from this deal?
Ricky Pearl
No, I'm not.
Junior Lartey
Sometimes it is a business transaction and that's what needs to be solved. It's not always break bread, have dinner and I don't know.
Ricky Pearl
This was like the highest level of professionalism and everything was just I think I have a great working relationship with these people. I no longer need to work with them, but I could probably call or email how things going? Touch base from time to time. But this wasn't about friendships or any of that. Only once in a three-year deal did I call any individual on their mobile phone. And only once did I text an individual. And it was only responding to his text where I had called him on his mobile phone and he texted me back. This was just core business outcomes, no tricks, like just doing the work the hard way and working through the processes.
Taylor Dahlem
Ricky, obviously we've touched on it, probably a lot of it at this point. But just to recap, so everybody understands, walk us through just a quick timeline again, start to finish, how long this took, and really also dive into the behind-the-scenes part. The part that not necessarily the conversations in person or the demonstrations, the big discovery, but more or less the deal management, the nitty gritty. How did you stay sane and stay focused and stay organized throughout this?
Ricky Pearl
So this is a big deal, right? If this is just one deal for one of these facilities, which if we're able to change the specification, we are then more likely to be the specification on the next deal, and the next deal and the next deal. So if we were to retain this client for ten years, you're talking potentially one hundred million dollars. If we were just to keep them on a few deals, tens of millions. So it's still great-sized deals. There's no lock-in contract. Yeah, you're at the design phase where they're building physical products, so you're engaging professionals often before they've gotten planning and approvals. They're in a design. And if you wanted to design a house, for example, from the time you're talking to your architect or you're buying the land till the time you land up, walking in the door, can be two years. This is the same on these products. It's a two to three year deal cycle. So extremely long. And at no point at this up until you get that order, two and a half years later, at no point up until then are you contracted in or you guaranteed revenue. So this was maybe by the end of it, probably up to one thousand emails backwards and forwards. And these emails are threads, right? There's the tenants, there's the clients, then there's the actual builder who's going to be placing the order. They all have their committees all on these email threads. There's no common slack. We're all in different time zones, different countries, different continents. So this is all being done by email and teams meetings. And so I probably had two teams meetings a week and thousands of emails every week for two years for the whole of the pandemic. And still up until this point, there's no guarantee of revenue until you get that order. They could just pull this project at any given stage to keep track of all of it. You could just imagine the clients. Ricky, what's the forecast? What's the pipeline? It's either one hundred million dollars or zero. I don't know what's the likelihood of this deal coming through? I'm like, well, it's a yes or a no, so I'd give that fifty-fifty. And I'm obviously trying to work other deals here. I need to keep money coming in more consistently to help fund the deals like this. I ended up building it out like a project page on notion. Again, not company-endorsed. So I had my own CRM where I'm keeping everything I'm now still using, funnily enough, this domain that I had set up for my prospecting is what landed up just becoming their default domains. This is like completely rogue, this whole deal anyways. But my company was on Office three hundred and sixty-five and I was prospecting off Google and I was like, this Google inbox is just so much better. I'm just keeping this all coordinated and consolidated. And this project page that I had built out on Notion over two and a half years probably became one of the best resources for this whole project that we could refer to. Decisions that would be made, minutes of meetings, recordings of meetings, email chains, everything. I have to win this deal on Share professionalism and expertise. That's all that I had going in any of this. By the end of it, obviously it ended up paying off very well that we're the default specification for that client, but now also the default specification for that tenant. Right? So it's a huge, huge and because that tenant is industry-leading, it's become now kind of like everyone's trying to live up to their trailblazing a path. Everyone else is trying to be like them. Now. Are we picking up the second tier and the third tier all because of it? So it's been completely game-changing for a company now in this new vertical. But yeah, the whole way through it was two and a half years worth of working and power to the company that was supplying the product to have faith in backing a project for two and a half years. Could you imagine not getting results as an account executive for two and a half years from now? I might have one hundred million dollars. That's it. And they were just like incredible. Management still kept the foot on the gas and the pressure was always on. But they understood complex deals like this. I have to bring it through as a one-man show, basically. I definitely had support. Like a lot of the questions that were asked I'd have to send off to engineers, hey, they want this specification, can we do a mock-up? Absolutely needed support. And they wouldn't be doing business with the one-man show. They were doing business because this was the company that was able to service them and they had faith in its capacity. To the point that when we got the order, there was only three people at my company that had spoken to anyone at the client or the tenants or the end builder. They were like, none of this was on their CRM, none of this was on their emails. I literally could have been making this all up for two and a half years. That's what it could have looked like.
Junior Lartey
From this perspective going super rogue, we.
Ricky Pearl
Got there, we got it. And it doesn't always go that way, but I think the important bit was like at that one year mark earlier on in this deal, we could see that everything was aligning and it wasn't with buyers and it wasn't with wishful thinking or with happy ears at the end of these meetings. It was you could see that this deal only had one logical outcome, which is either they build a facility and they'll be using us or they won't be building this facility. It came down to that kind of a gamble and we thought they're going to build this facility and if not it will take another two years which will still be poll position for the next yeah, we stuck at it.
Junior Lartey
Insane deal. I mean right? Two years, thousands of emails, two meetings a week for those two years. Timeline on this is crazy. I think to ask what three sales tips you have would fall short, but what three sales tips do you have?
Ricky Pearl
I think this is like a case. Firstly, multi-threading. Knowing everyone on the project was critical. But then also understanding for each person it's not just multi-threading. I've spoken to Junior. You got to understand each person that you multi-thread with, what is their motivation, what piece are they trying to solve within this puzzle, what's driving their decisions so that you can actually satisfy that person that you've multi-threaded with like just multi-threading for the sake of multi-threading won't get you there. That was the first thing. The second thing is understanding the genuine decision-making process. In this case, the decision maker, the actual decision maker had no access to at the tenant. No access to the closest I got to talking to anyone there was a consultant that they had hired to sit in on this project from a third-party risk consulting company. That's the closest I got to this actual decision-maker. But I understood that and so I had to put my filters up in such a way that I could understand what was coming back and how their decisions were being made. When I bounced it off the wall, like when the decision got bounced off them, which way it was going to decide what I have to send up the chain the next time. So understanding genuine decision-making process is critical. In this case, the economic buyer had zero decision-making ability. They were the ones signing the contract and paying the bills from the builder. They were just going to do what their client was going to say, was going to do what the tenants was going to say. And most junior reps would start with that economic bike. Who's signing the paperwork, whose budget is this coming out of? No, that's not where this deal's happening. By the time this deal gets to the economic buyer and gets to that decision maker, the decision is made. He is just pushing the paperwork through. And the last thing is understanding the motivating factors for decision-making. The product that we were selling was not directly tied to the service delivery or the service outcome for this client. If we're talking you're a cherry papa and you're selling to a company that sell a widget, is the product that you're delivering to them part of the product that they're delivering to their customers? Does it help them deliver that product? If it's a sales product, absolutely. There'll always be a lot of intrinsic interest in it. If it's part of their delivery, there'll be intrinsic interest. But this was an ancillary product. This is a door. They do not sell doors. They do not deliver door-related products. They deliver a service of which has to be housed within a secure facility for which they need a door. This was completely ancillary to the function they delivered. And so this was purely about risk avoidance. All they wanted to do was check a box to make a good decision and not be held accountable if something went wrong. That was it. And understanding that allowed us to position everything we did through that lens and that resonated. So they didn't care that this was the best. They cared that someone on the same line as them or above them thought that it was the best and made that decision for them and that they could take that as a statement of fact and move forward, but they could point the finger somewhere else. So that's, I think, the third tip. So multi-threading understanding the decision-making process and understanding motivating decision factors like risk avoidance, or is it for a particular outcome that they're looking to achieve? It's very important. Not enough professionals sell on that avoiding risk layer. They're always about delivering a positive outcome. Sometimes removing a negative outcome is more motivating to an individual.
Junior Lartey
Yeah. Ricky, man, this was a conversation. I'm really glad that we walked through this pretty slow. I will say this might be our longest podcast episode, but for good reason.
Ricky Pearl
I mean, if there's any bad parts, you just cut it, right? This is a three-year deal. Parts are summarized and I could go on for an hour in any one piece of it. But I think there's a lot of takeaways for account executives in process. Hopefully, they're not going to take the lesson of go build your own sales engagement platform. Leave that bit. But the rest of it, if you found any of it usefully, interesting, then that was great.
Junior Lartey
Yeah. Go connect with Ricky Pearl on LinkedIn. Thanks so much for joining us, Ricky.
Ricky Pearl
Thanks for having me on.
Taylor Dahlem
One of those deals that ultimately, when you listen to this, leave comments, let us know if this is the kind of content you want because we love having these conversations and cranking these things out. But Ricky obviously was an integral part of the deal and I think you'll be an integral part to our series here of conversations, but another episode of How I Deal is in the books. If you enjoyed this, please let us know through Spotify, Apple, or wherever you consume your podcast. And please drop us four, five, six stars, whatever you feel like giving us. But we do this for account executives and hopefully you find it educational. But thanks again for tuning in and we will see you next time.
