Alistair McQuade has written three books, all of which are available FREE on this website https://simu.ly. This is Deal Hack – Winning Deals Through Sales Team Collaboration. NOT available in audio.
Deal Hacks are a program of interactive group workshops that challenge and support live deals through a visually engaging, team-based process. Proven to create value in the sales process, Deal Hacks focus on deal outcomes rather than skills gaps, which are the focus of training and coaching. This creates a more direct and immediate impact on sales results. The program’s successes, and the uplift in results, create momentum and a pull effect where more salespeople change and organizational sales transformation is achieved.
Deal Hacks can be implemented immediately, with any sales methodology or process. There’s no need for training needs analyses or lengthy program design. This book shows what Deal Hacks are, why they work, and how they can be implemented using a simple five-step process in complex business-to- business sales organizations.
“Can we not just short circuit the sales training process and use the tools and techniques directly in the deals?” asked Brian Sharp, my client. Brian was Global VP of Commercial Management at Sealed Air Corporation, a multi-billion-dollar multinational in the throes of transforming their sales force. Brian was frustrated that, once again, they had rolled out a sales training initiative but the salespeople were still not using the required process, tools and techniques. Intel‐ lectually they knew how to use the tools, but they were not doing so in practice. Despite signicant investments in sales training and coaching by the business, there was a signicant gap between what the sales teams were trained to do and what they were actually doing. As a result, sales performance was moving in the wrong direc‐ tion. “Yes,” I replied to Brian, “We can hack the process.”
After 20 years of leading and consulting in sales enablement for a number of global organizations, I have seen more than most what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to organizational sales eectiveness and sales transformation. I recently asked an old friend who has a similar amount of experience in sales training and coaching for major companies, “Do you not mind that the sales‐ people you’re training and coaching will not change and will not improve?” “It’s all part of the job,” he replied in a matter of fact way. The most shocking thing about this conversation is the acceptance that failure in sales transformation is almost inevitable. We all know what we should do in a sales process, but for some inexplicable reason we do something else, and this failure exists at all levels in sales organizations. This was the failure that Brian Sharp had witnessed in his sales organization and, through frustration, wanted to develop another path beyond sales training and coaching, the primary tools in the sales organizational development toolkit. Since that conversation with Brian, I’ve been running Deal Hacks for over six years now, across a number of sales organizations. In that time, I’ve perfected the Deal Hack process and scaled Deal Hacks through sales organizations. I’ve written this book to share my findings and demonstrate what deal hacks are, how they can be imple‐ mented and used alongside sales training and coaching to maximize organizational sales performance and transformation.
The film ‘Alien’ was conceptually described, to would-be investors, as “Jaws in Space.” That was because there were two key concepts that came together to make the lm. Firstly, a there was suspense concept like that found in the lm ‘Jaws’ and secondly there was the concept of it being in outer space. Deal Hacks are not held in outer space, and only occasionally can be described as a ‘horror’, but we can use the same technique to describe them conceptu‐ ally: “Team based deal reviews in a workshop.” The rst concept is that deals are reviewed, but this is done in a team-based workshop environment rather than the traditional one to one environment. They are not training because training focuses on skills gaps and Deal Hacks focus on improving the deals. Deal Hacks are similar to coaching, but they are specically ‘Deal Coaching’ in a group setting. Traditional coaching focuses on developing the coachee. Improving the deal outcome is the most important outcome of a
Deal Hack. Improving deal outcomes has a more direct and imme‐ diate impact on sales results. Importantly, it is this focus on winning results that creates the engine of change which pulls change through the organization. It’s easier to see the immediate and direct impact on their deals, something that is harder with more abstract alterna‐ tives like sales training and traditional coaching. Through Deal Hack reporting we’re able to give the sales leadership insights into the health of their deals across the whole sales organization. This helps them to make better decisions when it comes to leading and managing sales performance and resources. As we’ll see in part one, our understanding of where our performance gaps are, or where they are not, is often signicantly wide of the mark. This means that many sales performance interventions are solving the wrong prob‐ lems, and that is a major reason that many sales transformation programs are ineective. They have a fundamental aw running through them. Deal Hacks don’t suer from this problem, and they can make diagnosis more accurate for training and coaching inter‐ ventions that sit alongside.
Deal Hacks narrow the gap between what we intellectually know we should do to win sales, and what we actually do in prac‐ tice. But there’s one more thing. When designing sales negotiation training for LinkedIn, the Director of Sales, LinkedIn Learning Solutions, Ami Borsetti, said to me, “Al, we don’t have the time to do all that design and development; we need results now. We’re building the plane as we’re ying it!” This describes the typical business envi‐ ronment today that we’re all experiencing. The urgency and the desire to improve sales more quickly, and for the sales populations to adapt more rapidly to market changes. Companies don’t have months to spend designing and launching sales training programs anymore. By this time the opportunity has been lost. To give you an idea of how quickly Deal Hacks can diagnose and x sales perfor‐ mance gaps, I recently held a Deal Hack with a team of inside soft‐ ware salespeople. We worked on four deals and improved the deals while sharing best practices and insights across the team. From the
results of the Deal Hack the team agreed they all had gaps in value creation in the sales process. The next week we held a training workshop to ll these gaps based on the deals we’d hacked. The time from diagnosis to x was one week, and we directly improved four deals in the process. No skills gap analysis, no vendor/program selection, and no scoping. No salespeople saying they were too busy or didn’t need the training. The same company rolled out value based sales training the year before. One of the metrics used to measure success was how many of the salespeople were creating a value based business case for their prospects. One year after the sales training only ve of the one hundred deals forecast had a value based business case. Time to roll out the training again? No. We implemented Deal Hacks and in the next quarter there were 50 value based business cases, moving the value selling metric by 10 times. The results of the training alone were considered a failure, but implementing Deal Hacks turned the program into a success. The sales training focused on how the salespeople should sell, while the Deal Hacks focused on challenging and supporting the sales‐ people to help them change how they sold. The two are completely dierent problems to solve as we’ll see. Changing sales performance through Deal Hacks is performed in-eld, it aligns with how sales‐ people think, and how they work. Training does not do that. The result of the combined approach is an immediate and direct impact on sales, which is instantly measurable, and aligns with today’s fast- paced business environment. From these successes, momentum is created, people buy-in and sales performance is transformed.
This book shows what Deal Hacks are, why they are needed, why they work, how they t alongside traditional training and coaching, and how they can be implemented easily and successfully in a complex business-to-business sales organization.
This is a sequential journey that culminates in improved sales performance and sales results by setting up a program of ‘Deal Hacks.’ Like any signicant journey, there are necessary stops along the way. Each of the ve parts in this book build on each other. In Part One we look at the blind spots salespeople and sales leaders have that can shut down our ability to adapt and change how we sell. We look at the problem of diminishing returns and understand the limitations of focusing too much on how people sell by simply using more sales training and coaching to improve sales perfor‐ mance, and not eectively working on the separate issue of changing behaviors. In Part Two we look into the brain of the individual to understand how to design performance interventions that work with
the sales brain and not against it, which facilitates change. In Part Three we look at how to create a growth mind-set culture in sales organizations that increases performance instead of shutting it down. In Part Four we look at what Deal Hacks are and how they take learning outside of the classroom and put it back into the work‐ ow, creating the engine of change. In Part Five we look at how to set up a Deal Hack program and scale Deal Hacks across complex business to business sales organizations. Tempting though it is, jumping to the ‘solution’ in Part Four, will leave you lost and confused. Please don’t allow your Social Brain to make the decision to short-circuit the process. We need you to switch on your Intellec‐ tual Brain to make the best decision, because as you’ll see in Part Two, Social Brain thinking is one of the root causes of low sales performance.
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