How Dealpad Helps Sales Teams Win Complex Software Deals at Scale (Talk by CEO Adam Baker)

Introduction and Speaker Background

Adam Baker

00:00Hi, everyone. I'm Adam. So in the next twenty minutes, I'm going to just talk to you about three things. One is some mistakes to avoid that I've seen consistently that kill sales deals, and AEs make them all the time. Even the best AEs make them. The other is to know your ICP and how important, really understanding who your ideal customer is. If you don't understand that, you're not going to scale sales. And then finally, some kind

About Adam Baker and Dealpad

Adam Baker

00:25of tactics and processes that I've implemented to win complex deals. So a bit about me. I'm a three time software founder. I've generated $20,000,000 of ARR across my three companies. I'm currently building Dealpad, which helps sales teams generate revenue. And I've also been a sales leader at Salesforce, Intuit and three kind of sixty seventy million ARR SaaS companies. And across that period of time, about twenty years, I'm actually quite old, I know you wouldn't really know

00:54it, but I've built a process to help my sales teams win more of the deals they're working on. And as product differentiation gets increasingly blurred and competitive pricing kind of almost rules you out of the market, the one reason that you'll win more deals is your sales process. And so that's what we focus on at Dealpad, that's what I'm going to talk to you about today in terms of what you can do to implement some ideas

01:17in your sales process that will help you win more deals. So I like this. I'm a I'm a founder. I'm an entrepreneur. So this is a a great graph of founders, but it's also really true for salespeople. Right? One minute, we're brilliant. We've got all the confidence in the world. We think we can go out and close that 1,000,000 plus kind of ACV. And the next minute, we're really shit, and we can't do anything. And so

01:37the line is there, just keep working because you're going to get there. And so I don't know how many founders in the room, but this is great for founders and it's definitely great for salespeople.

The Emotional Rollercoaster of Founders and Salespeople

Adam Baker

01:47So the five mistakes that I've seen across my time in selling software over the last twenty years, except in the first pain that you see. This is super important. And AEs, really good AEs don't do this, but the average AEs do. And what I mean by this is you're going to talk to a buyer, probably not your champion, and you're going to find a pain. And that pain probably sits locally inside the organization. It's probably not

Mistake 1: Accepting the First Pain You See

Adam Baker

02:13a global pain. It doesn't sit across the company. And what you really need to understand here is that if you accept that pain, you're losing revenue massively. You're leaving it on the table. And so drill in. And I keep telling my AEs to drill into the pain because the first, second, third pain you see is not the real pain. You need to make sure that you've got access to the executive team. Is this problem business critical?

02:35Does it sit across the organization? And that's where you're going to start to build out really high value deals. And AEs miss that because what they do is get excited when they hear that first pain, and they dive in for that. It's not a bad thing. So there's nothing wrong with this. But it does mean that you're now going to be in an organized and we I had an AE that sold into Oracle, and we had

02:55a 7,500 ACV deal in Oracle.

03:00Nuts. Right? But but we the the team were happy because we'd just signed Oracle as a customer, but Oracle didn't know anything about this deal. It was some guy sat in wherever he was in Poland and and, you know, needed something that that we we delivered. But we it was try now going back into Oracle and selling through that organization. It was impossible. Oracle stayed a £7,500 customer. We couldn't we just couldn't upsell them. The next

Mistake 2: Selling Without Executive Sponsor Access

Adam Baker

03:25is do not invest time in deals if you don't have executive sponsor. I see this so often. Salespeople spending time in deals where they don't have access to buying authority. They've got a champion. They've got someone that loves the product. They're evangelical about it, but you can't get access to the exec sponsor pull out immediately. I won't let my team sell into a a company. If we get past qualification, we do not sit Discovery unless we

03:50get exec sponsor access. It's one of our conditions. If if you want a demo, if you want to go through Discovery with us, we need to have exec sponsors on that call. Otherwise, we don't move forward. And if they want to buy from us, then they'll do that. If they don't, then they won't. Really important, you can waste hours of time in deals that don't close because you don't have access to the people that actually are

Mistake 3: Demoing Too Early

Adam Baker

04:10gonna sign this off. The third one is demoing too early. If you demo early before you've gone through really deep discovery, you're forcing yourself to get embroiled in feature selling because you're just showing people features. That's what a demo is. The demo should come at the end. Don't show your product until you've actually gone through a discovery. You've identified the pain. You've agreed with your buyers that we are a solution that can solve that pain. Now

04:38great. What does this look like? Who's going to use this? Let's get them on a call. Let's show them the product. But you don't need to see the product until we actually agree that we can solve a problem for you, and we know that we can solve it as well. And that takes time. If you're demoing on that first call, you're embroiling yourself in feature selling and not value selling. And so again, your ACV is going

04:58get low. You might close the deal. You might not walk away from this that that deal and think, oh, god, that was awful because you've got a new customer, but you're leaving revenue on the table.

Mistake 4: Letting Buyers Dictate the Process

Adam Baker

05:08Allowing the buying teams to dictate the process, this is a hard one, particularly as you get into more complex kind of higher enterprise type deals. Most buyers are very fairly sophisticated these days and they have their own process. One of the things that we're really focused on at Dealpad is how to align with the buyer through the process so you're partnering with them. And so it's not me selling to them, and it's not them running their

Mistake 5: Not Quitting Losing Deals Fast Enough

Adam Baker

05:31process. We do this together. And it's it's a game changer. But make sure that, you know, your team aren't just telling you what's going on in this process and you have no control over it because that's the worst place you could be as a salesperson. And then finally is not quitting fast enough, staying in these deals that you don't think you're going to close. Really, really important. One of my teams I think I've got a slide

05:52in it, but one of my teams wasted two and a half thousand hours one year selling it into deals that we didn't close across that team. If we redeployed that time into deals we thought we could win or had a better chance of winning, you know, I think we we delivered about 75% of our annual quota that year. We could have smashed through it if we'd actually redeployed the time we wasted in deals that we didn't

06:14close. So close fast. And the benefits from doing the right thing are very small in sales. The benefits from pulling out really quickly are massive.

06:25It's discipline. Trying to coach a sales team to leave a deal and walk away from an opportunity is hard. But it's in the long run, it's the best thing to do.

06:37So how do we find our ICP? Well, the first thing you need to understand is why are customers buying from you? A typical if I ask nine out of 10 AEs, a typical answer would be, well, we've got an ERP system that helps automate accounting. Well, that's not why customers are buying from you. Customers are buying cash flow because with your ERP system, they get cash in the bank thirty days faster. That's what they're buying from

Finding Your ICP: What Are Customers Really Buying

Adam Baker

07:06you. Understand what customers buy from you. Dealpad customers buy revenue. They want to close more of their deals. They want to book more revenue. That's why they come to us. They don't come to us because we've got mutual action plans and we've got a buying experience platform. They come because we have the ability to help them generate revenue. That's what they're buying. So really understand what your customers are buying from you. And again, it's something that

07:28gets overlooked quite a lot. When we started our ICP for all of my companies, really, we look at kind of understanding what the pain we're solving is. How critical is it? What happens if we turn this off? What are they doing today? You know, what tools are they using? Why is it inefficient? Why is their life not where they need it to be today? We really try to understand the pain we're solving from our from our

07:50ideal customer. And then we look at the the customer themselves. Who's who are our buyers? You know, what do they care about? We we actually go personal on this, and we go deep, and we really wanna know who they are. This is probably not even work related. We just want to understand who our ideal buyer is and what they look like,

How to Win Ultra-Complex Enterprise Deals

Adam Baker

08:08And it makes a big difference. So let's go into how we won ultra complex deals. So there's a few things here. 47% of enterprise sales deals don't close because you don't have access to the buying committee.

08:2218% of competitors had stronger relationships. So these two are people related. So we're looking here at almost 70% of deals that don't close are people related. And it just goes to show how important it is when you're sitting out talking about a sales opportunity, you have the right people at the table and you are able to access them. If you don't, it doesn't matter how good your solution is, how good your story is, it won't close.

08:4717% no decisions. How can you affect no decisions? It's the biggest killer of most mid market deals is no decision. We're not going to do anything. And it's a challenge. And there's no real answer to no decision. It's more about how you partner with that buyer. Because if you can partner with them, you can take them through the process together, you're more likely to force a no decision into into a decision, which will mean they'll buy

09:09from you. And this was the two thousand and a half hours loss. What's the what's the opportunity cost of your sales team sat in deals that aren't going to close?

The Role of Champion, Coach, and Believers

Adam Baker

09:21And then champion, everybody gets a champion. Everybody has believers. The one thing that I see a lot of AEs miss is the coach. The coach for me is the most important person in your sales process. Your champion is probably gonna be the influencer. They're gonna be the ones that are gonna get the exec team to the table. Your believers are the people that really want this because they see the pain. They feel it every day. They

09:43live the pain you're gonna solve for them. But your coach, that's the person that's going to take you through that process. That's the person who's going to tell you, you know what? We've had this competitor come in, and, you know, they've got a really great relationship with the CEO. Or I was sat in a meeting last week and, you know, great sentiment about your product, but X, Y, and Z is a little bit, you know, a

10:05little bit skeptical. You need a coach inside that business. You need to understand how they're thinking. Finding the coach is difficult, but it's the most important role you can have, I believe, in any mid market to enterprise sales motion. And then you've got mutual action plans. And this is a kind of a bit of a demo for Dealpad. So mutual action plans, if you don't use them, are a really great way of aligning through the process

Mutual Action Plans and the Dealpad Platform

Adam Baker

10:30with your buyer on everything that needs to happen. With Dealpad, you can lock in everything that needs to happen here. You can bring all the people in place. Your buyers bring each other in. So now you don't need to go out and find your buying team. You're discovering your buying team through the process because your buyers add them in. And then it locks in a date for this task. So everything now is not built on intuition.

10:54So if I ask my sales team before Dealpad to forecast and they say to me, well, this is going close on the April 30. And these are the reasons why that's full of optimism and intuition. So my CRM pipeline is just built for optimism. Now when I do my deal reviews and we've got Dealpad, I'm actually saying, do we have everything aligned with our buyer, everything locked in, all the people we need, and has any date

11:17slipped? That's how we forecast now. And it makes a massive difference.

11:23And then finally, on this place, it's about value. It's taking your buyer through a process and not just running the process that your buyer wants you to go through. Have a process, whatever it is. This is what ours looks like. Ours is a kickoff, an exec sponsor meeting. We start there. Like I said, we don't go any further unless we've got an exec sponsor. And then we kind of build out workshops. We interview people. We want

11:47to understand who our users are. We want to understand what their problems they're solving are. And everybody that we speak to in that team will have a different reason for using it. Everyone. And understanding what those reasons are are going to help you solidify that deal when you go through the process. This was a I asked my customer if I could share this and they agree with me. So this is a close one from

12:11Q4 twenty twenty one before one of our customers this is one of our first customers, before they use Dealpad. They took Dealpad on in their first quarter, that's their close one. No shit. And that's the next quarter. By building in a process, by allowing your buyers to partner with you, by doing the right things, you're going to close more deals.

Founder-Led Sales and Cold Outreach

Adam Baker

12:37Look, the best person to sell your platform is going to be your founder. It is. It doesn't matter if you're the chief sales officer, you're the VP of sales, whoever you are in this room, if you're not the founder, I can tell you the best person to sell your product is going to be the founder. If your founder isn't involved in sales and your company is less than $100,000,000 in revenue, you want to campaign and make

13:00sure they get involved in sales. Because they be the ones that will help you close those big deals, 100%. That's not even up for debate. If your founder is not involved in your sales process, you need to get them involved in your sales process. And when I think about my personal outreach, I do cold outreach and I get 70% more response from the people that I reach out to than my SDR team. That tells me that

13:26I should probably do more of it. And it's hard to do more to be an SDR when you're running a business, right? But I see it works. And it's just gravitas and it's bullshit because my SDRs are way better than me at what they do. I can guarantee it. But because I'm the founder and I've got the CEO title, it just helps me get a response. And it's my job, because it's my company, to do whatever

13:51I can to generate revenue. And yeah, the C level relationships became a difference to us, closing 1,000,000 ARR contracts in my previous business. I spent the equivalent of probably about, I don't know, of hours with our big top enterprise customers, helping my team close them, flying all over the world to do it. And it's not easy, but it makes a difference. So I just want to talk to you very quickly about a process that we build

Dealpad's Buying Experience Process

Adam Baker

14:20at Dealpad. And so we take the prospect from the kind of the very first engagement where you build out these personalized buying experiences and you curate all of the content and materials that your buying team needs to have in one place. And now you've got your buying team in, your buying team invite each other in, so now you've got all the people involved, and you go through the process together, and you won't really understand intent fast.

14:46So you've got analytics that will show you how your buying team are engaging through your process, where the gaps are. Do you have all the right people in your team? You know, where do you need to really focus in? You can collaborate with them. So you're building a two way sales process now. You're not sharing documents on email, chasing them up for introductions. You're actually partnering with them. And again, I can tell you from experience, if

15:07you're in a vendor ship with five three or five other vendors, I can almost guarantee you today this will probably change, but today most vendors are sharing documents on email, on G Docs, on SharePoint. They're chasing their buyers up. From a buyer, to have that from three or four vendors, it's a massive headache. If you can partner with them and you can show them how easy it is to work with you, you're way more likely to

15:31win that deal. And that's why, as I go back to one of the first things I said, building a sales process that will become your differentiator in winning more deals is critical when you're selling software today.

15:46So So that's it. I'm not sure how long that was. But come to us come to our booth. We'd love to give you a demo of Dealpad, talk to about what we can do. We've got free mutual action plan templates, free SaaS playbooks. Come and get them. We'd love to talk to you. Thank you so much.