Amit Agarwal on The Ultimate Sales Accelerator

He has coined the term “salespreneur”, created a sales strategy, “use case selling”, and has professional selling experience in 23 countries across bootstrap, Series A, B, C, and D startups. He’s a TEDx speaker, so he’s very well accustomed to the 20-minute bit. Amit trains on sales innovation in various forums, including academic institutes and industry bodies such as IIT, IIM, and NASSCOM. NASSCOM is the largest software industry body in India. Amit is also the author of two books. And today, his session, The Magic of One Thing in Sales: How to Achieve More in Sales by Doing Less, is based on his first book, “The ultimate sales accelerator”.

Amit, welcome and take it away.

Amit Agarwal

Thank you, Subhanjan. It is always a pleasure speaking to you and the audience. So very excited to start this session. Welcome to everybody. Today’s session is about the magic of one thing in sales, how to achieve more in sales by doing less. Let’s start this session through a poll. Subhanjan and team, if you could please launch this poll. I would request everybody to participate in the polls. Subhanjan and team, whenever you feel majority of participants have responded, you can share the results. Yeah, so thanks to everyone for participating in the poll. We see that 83% say, I am stressed because it is hard to prioritize among so many activities for client engagement. And 16.67% said, Even after all the hard work of my customer meetings, they do not yield outcomes. And interestingly, we had 0% vote on the amount of content which is being shared. Now what if I share with you that what we are about to discuss in this call, which is the magic of one thing in sales, can address all the three problems which you just voted for. So let’s start. So you might have heard Pareto principle, and what is the difference between Pareto principle and the one thing?

Pareto principle, as we all know, is a 20-80 rule which says 80% of effects stems from 20% of causes for most events. One of the most famous example in sales is that 20% of customers give 80% of revenue, or 20% of leads give 80% of conversions, and so on. What is the one thing? This I learned in the book called “The One Thing”, which is based on one question, called focusing question, which is— “what is the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else would be easier or unnecessary”? To just give an example, let’s say you all are qualified sales consultants and one of the CEOs of a large company invites you to identify problems in sales and you identify hundreds such problems. Then you apply the 20-80 rule, the Pareto principle, and you find out 20 most important problems out of those hundred. You don’t stop there. You apply the Pareto principle again. And out of those 20, 20 % of 20 is four. So you get four major problems. You again apply Pareto principle on four and you get 0.8 or the one.

So if you are able to identify that one, that is a logical explanation of one thing. Now let’s look at the mathematical view of one thing. So the Pareto principle states that 80% of effects stem from 20% of causes. Now what happens if we keep applying the Pareto principle? I would request you to read this. And then when you continue applying what happens? The key message is 51.2% of effects are being caused by 0.8% of the causes. This is what CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, found out in 2002 when he wrote, “about 20% of the bugs cost 80% of all errors”. And this is stunning to me. One percent of bugs cost half of all errors. So now let me explain the power of one thing, how I understood it. So there was a question that changed my life on December 28, 2017. Now this is a time where new year resolutions are there. And in my case, I was regularly irregular in meeting up with these new year resolutions. That year, I asked one question, which is— “what is the one habit I can develop in 2018 such that by developing it, everything else would be easier or unnecessary”.

And the answer came— wake up at 5:00 AM. I’ve been thinking about it for many years. Fortunately, by asking this one habit question, the answer was quite clear. Now, what happened when I woke up on January 2^nd, 2018? I remember when I woke up, it was around 5:00 AM through the help of an alarm clock. The body said, ‘Keep sleeping. Blanket is so warm. It is so cold’. The mind said, ‘you have been sleeping from ages. You agreed to do one thing, please wake up’. The mind won— I woke up. I switched on the lights of my study room. I came out and I saw a library set of books which were inviting me saying, just spend some time with us. I spent some time with one of the books. Then I said, what else to do? Because I was waking up so early after such a long time. Then I meditated for a while. Then I went for cycling. Then I started for office earlier. Then I came from office earlier. Then I had my dinner at around 7:00, 7:15 PM. Then I told two stories to my two kids at around 9:00 PM and around 9:15, I slept.

Observe what is happening. A domino effect was getting created by just focusing on one thing, which is waking up at 5:00 AM. That’s the power of one thing. Now, having understood it, let us see how we can apply the one thing in sales. There are many applications. I have picked three categories: client engagement, sales planning, and team and processes.

Let’s start with client engagement. The question, ‘what is the one thing I can achieve in this client meeting’? Whenever we go for client meetings, a lot of times we will have N number of things to achieve, and sometimes we will have nothing. We just start going. Whenever I go for a meeting, whether it is with a client or with a CEO or with anybody, I’ll ask, ‘What is the one thing’? I’ll give you a recent example. I met a client and we spent four hours. My one thing was that can I get approval on a reference call with a client? And before the four hours ended, I achieved it. Similarly, the second one, if I have to present only one slide to client, which slide will I present?

Now this is a very difficult one because we have N number of slides. Which one is the most important? In fact, you can ask me towards the end of the presentation, if I had to present only one slide in this entire presentation, which one should I present? And I will answer that. And the third one is, if I have to share only one case study, there are so many success stories I have, which is the most relevant and pertinent one to this client, which one would I share? Now if you look at these two, these are actually focusing on what we call engagement through content sharing. And Gartner actually did an interesting research where they coined the term “sense-making selling”. And they say there are three kinds of sellers. One is giving, another is telling, another is sense-making. In simple terms, giving is about ‘I can give you a lot more information’. Telling is ‘let me tell you what you need to know’. And sense-making is ‘there is a lot of information— let me help you make sense of it’. And Gartner’s director advisory says while the giving approach focuses on more, those who practice sense-making focus on less.

And what happens when you focus on less? Gartner research further says that when you focus on less, in terms of closures, sense-making selling outranks every other form of selling where they say eight out of ten because you are focusing on less. Coming back to using one thing in sales. We discussed client engagement, three examples. Let’s talk about sales planning. What is the one thing I can achieve in sales in this quarter such that it will de-risk the entire year? Now when I asked this question four quarters before I got an answer, get 60 leads in this quarter, because if we get these 60 leads, then in the beginning of the financial year, we are sorted. Now this answer may be different for you. The point is about asking this question. Now in teams and processes, what is the one capability my sales team can develop in this quarter for predictable closures? When I asked in one quarter, the answer I got was storytelling. In another I got empathy. Next question is what is the one thing we need to stop during our sales process? In the early part of my career in one of the companies when I asked this question, the response came, ‘we should stop doing a corporate overview which consumes 10-15 minutes of our time when most of the clients already know what the company does’.

Now these are only some questions. The point is you can frame different questions in line with the one thing philosophy or mindset. Now let’s look at few practical examples of implementing the one thing in Sales. One example is a person called Ashwin Kashnish, who used one thing for closing a deal. He’s featured in the book, The ultimate sales accelerator. I’ll let you read this because it’s the excerpt from the book. I hope you have read it. If you notice what Ashwin did is he found one thing for each of the buyer stakeholder he was talking to, whether it is IT head, security protocol, marketing head, ROI, legal head, compliance, end-user, customer support, decision-making, business partner. So you see how he has implemented the one thing in a different context of identifying one value creation area for each of the key stakeholder in the buying community. Let’s look at the second example. In sales, we have several tasks. Some of you said that we are overwhelmed with the number of activities which we have to do. This we implemented in one of the companies where I have worked, wherein the CRM itself— this is a direct snapshot from CRM, among all activities, we have actually created a priority task, where actually their sales owners can click or tick on those three tasks, up to three tasks for priority tasks.

You may have 10, 15 tasks, but only three can be priority tasks. This is a review report of Salesforce. There are three tasks for a particular deal, and this is a bigger view where you can read it properly with these three tasks. Whenever I review, first of all, if a sales owner is doing three things, writing priority tasks, this is good. And then I will ask among these three, if you have to select one, the most important, which one would you choose? You can reflect on it. And if you have to select one among these three, which one would you choose? This is the first one. This is the second one. This is the third one. And if you want to type in the chat window, you can type one, two, or three if you have to choose only one. Sharing and participating increases and deepens the knowledge, so I would encourage you. If you have to choose one among these three as the one thing, which one would you choose?

So the one thing for me is set up a meeting with CFO for a final discussion on payment terms. Interestingly, we identified the one thing. However, for certain reasons this couldn’t happen. We did both the above two, but we couldn’t do this. And interestingly, or you can say predictively, since we didn’t do this one thing, the deal didn’t get closed.

So moving on to the third example, if you have to present only one slide to a client, again, I’m sharing a real-life example of a client where we presented, if we had to present only one slide, this is the slide, where if you see this uses a checklist format, a checklist format for the product which we are selling, and it compares the adoption of the checklist on that client. Actually these are real names. I have hidden them as client and competitor one, competitor two, competitor three. So this is an actual client, and these are the three competitors of that client. And this is the slide which we showed to them. It will automatically create aspiration or anxiety, and it did create. So this is the context in the product which we were selling.

This is the one slide. In your context, that one slide could be different. So now the question which I said, if I had to present only one slide in this presentation, what will I present? Then it would be this, the slide number 13, because this slide captures the essence of the entire presentation in one slide, even though I’m using animations.

So now, an exercise on one thing, a principle that you can do after the session. What is the one case study I can present to my client? What is the one skill my sales team need to develop by March, actually 2024? What is the one thing I or we need to stop during our sales process and so on. I have given you three questions. You can do three or in the spirit of one thing, you can only do one. With that, my wish for you, may you embrace the one thing mindset in sales: to be more happy, to have more contentment, and to have more satisfaction, and experience more contentment, deal closures, client happiness by doing less. Thank you very much.

Subhanjan Sarkar

That was excellent, Amit. That was excellent. That was excellent, Amit. We’ll wait a bit. We have a couple of minutes. You have actually brought us up to speed. Thank you very much for that. But sometimes you feel, when you react to situations like this, sometimes you think that it is, oh, this is like magic. This is not going to work. That’s your reaction. Anyway, it sounds so simple. Nothing simple can work to make complex lives easier. I mean, you’re talking very specifically about business.

And by the way, I just saw your subject is actually in the audience, Ashwin. So should we get him on stage and ask whether he wants to talk a bit about what you just shared? If he is willing to, it is interesting. So, Ashwin, if you’re hearing us, you’ll have a hand-raised icon on your screen. Oh, there he is. There he is. I’ll get him on. Yeah. Hey, welcome, Ashwin. Thanks for joining.

Ashwin

Hi. Thank you for having me.

Subhanjan Sarkar

Wonderful. I mean, this is great. So this is exactly what we want, that we want the book, we want the author, and we want subjects to come and talk about how it works. So tell us a bit about how this worked for you.

Ashwin

It worked wonders for me. Thank you for having me here once again. It is something that goes beyond the sales profession. It is one thing that you can apply to your closest relationships. You can apply to any walks of life and try to get your focus on that one particular thing, like Amit just mentioned. I still practice this and at work in my sales profession. And whenever I find the opportunity to bring me back to that one particular thing, which is most crucial. I mean, it could be the one thing that I have to practice, let’s say, to discipline my child. It could be the one thing that I need to do in order to have a great vacation, to plan a great vacation.

In my opinion, the one thing goes just beyond sales. But if we were to talk about sales and in very often in complex sales situations, like we just saw the poll as well, and I gave the poll as well, and I would have wished to click for all three— these are situations that are very common for us to get into. So this always helps. Having this compass in your head always helps— that if you were to just do one thing or if you were to focus on just one thing, be it one slide, be it one takeaway, be it one objective. So I think I have won quite a few deals by practicing this. It is very practical. It can be applied. It is not a theoretical concept. It’s a very much practical concept. I encourage people to try it out for themselves and then share more experiences on this. I have been quite successful practicing this.

Subhanjan Sarkar

Wonderful. Thank you, Ashwin. I think with this, we can bring this session to a close. And thanks, Amit, again for making time. I really enjoyed listening to you again. And I hope to have you back when we have the next fest.

Amit Agarwal

Thank you, Subhanjan, wish you all the best. And I look forward to the rest of the speakers. Wishing the audience all the best. Thank you.

Subhanjan Sarkar

Thank you. Thank you. We’ll end the session. We’ll be back in a couple of minutes.

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