Arturo Marin #019

• Hire only people who are better than you
• Key priorities as a new CRO
  • Build out the process (esp. by hiring a strong RevOps leader)
  • Measure pipeline generation
  • Tune the capacity plan based on
    • the true revenue contribution per seller over time
    • the desired ratios between sellers and sales support
  • Refine your ICP
  • Segment territories
• Give people the path to President’s Club by defining and holding people accountable leading indicators

Sam Costello #016

• If you make the customer successful, then you earn the right to ask for value in exchange.
• Bring the best people into the business; be maniacal about building pipeline; go execute against the pain in the market so that your customers are successful.

(Missing #015)

Alex Varel #014

• When evaluating candidates, break he profile up into intangibles, competencies, and experience.
  • Intangibles:
    • Drive: What is someone trying to prove? What are they trying to avoid?
    • Intelligence: Street smart & book-smart. Can you apply what you being taught?
• When I’m recruiting, I’m looking for people who want to win in a really big way and who want to leave nothing to chance.
• Recognition works but it must be earned and must be authentic.
• The most important job of a first line leader is being able to identify and attract the right talent.

Olli Krebs #013

• If you want to teach something, you should have done it yourself in the past.
• You can’t train people for one week in a room and then send them into the field and say, ‘Now go sell!’ Managers need to join new reps in customer meetings with the goal of listening in order to provide immediate feedback.
• Customers today come to you already knowing what they want. Your job is then to guide them to your solutions.

Dan Miller #012

• Understand
  • The current state & the problems associated with the current state
  • The future state & the positive business outcomes that would come from that
  • The requirements that drive the transition from the current to the future state
  • From among the requirements, the unique differentiators of our solution
• You need a quick feedback loop between sales, product, and engineering.
• Construct your sales onboarding bootcamp to mirror your sales process. And make it rigorous enough that some new hires may not make it through.
• Deal drivers:
  • Cost Savings (M in MEDDICC)
  • Compelling Event
  • Political landscape and personas (E in MEDDICC)
    • Individual developers
    • Middle level
    • CxO business fit
  • Compelling, unique differentiator exposed via a technical validation event (Decision Criteria & Decision Process in MEDDICC)
  • Strong champions at every level (Champion in MEDDICC)
  • Constant deal reviews
• As a leader, is it #1 about recruiting, #2 about enabling and retaining your team, and then #3 about booking revenue but that comes naturally as a consequence of the first two.

Chris Mahoney #011

• Nothing is ever going to replace execution.
• Empathy
  • What would it be like to be in that person’s situation?
  • What could you do to help that person?
  • How would you help that person help themself?
• You can have a different process, but if you have the same culture, intensity, and mindset of winning then you can succeed
• ICE (portion of MEDDPICC) = identify pain, champion, & economic buyer
• I won’t get outworked and I’m not afraid of being wrong
• Clarity in communication – scheduling and sequencing what you are going to ask the field (sellers) to do – is so incredibly important. Simplicity scales.

Seth Olsen #010

• What stood out most during my time at Snowflake was the emphasis on PG [pipeline generation]. They live and die by PG. Not necessarily at the individual level, but how do you collectively generate pipeline as a group? How do you set the vision? How do you put in the structures and the discipline to excel at PG?
• We measure discovery calls, new business meetings, and pipeline created on a weekly and monthly basis.
• Is this opportunity really qualified?
  • What is the value offering for this customer/prospect?
  • Do we have a champion?
  • Have we engaged with the economic buyer?
  • Do we truly understand their pain?

Jason Eubanks #009

• If asked about your college GPA during an interview, answer without hesitation even if it was not stellar. Being careful to avoid making excuses, explain your character-building priorities that led you to make intentional tradeoffs. This is a character question, not an intellect question. If someone lies or says they can’t remember, then you cannot trust them in a forecast call.
• I let the data tell me what the process should be. For instance, I learned that if we get the product in the hands of the prospect immediately, within the first meeting, without going through deep discovery, a business value assessment, and tech scoping workshops, then we had a drastically higher (2.5x) conversion rate.
• SLG is a complement to, not a substitute for, PLG.
• At Twilio, we took things from having to understand the wide-open art of the possible into targeting the buyer personas who cared about 5 solution categories tied to 9 use cases. This served as the foundation for enabling AEs, SEs, partners, etc.

Pete Agresta #008

• When selling into large financial services, don’t just sell technology, build business partnerships. For example, bankers are looking to provide financing and M&A solutions to your company.
• When your CEO sets a meeting with a peer CEO at a client or prospect, they should ask, “Do you mind if I have my sales executive in the room with us?”
• Your job as a Strategic Account Manager is to get your MBA in that account. Get to know their strategic projects.
• When you are feeling anxious or unfulfilled in your job, go spend more time with customers & prospects.
• Hire for personality, coach for skills.
• To make meaningful connections, you don’t have to be a profound expert, you just need to have one insight and deliver it with confidence.
• The best salespeople build strong relationships internally. They are not ‘playing politics,’ they are just trying to succeed in their job.
• Sales is a contact sport. As a senior sales leader, you cannot run the business without getting out into the field with your reps.
• When you sell exclusively through partners, you must be intentional about how to bring high level value to enterprise customers or that muscle will atrophy.
• Your operating rhythm is not optional.

Chris Singletary #007

• At PTC, you were on recurring ’90-day contracts’ – if you did not sell, you were fired.
• Know more about the customer than they know about themselves; or, at least know more than the next rep who also engaging your prospect.
• MEDDPICC is especially a tool for reps to hold themselves accountable for which deals to work and how to work them.
• For pipe gen, we talk about 36-24-6-4. That is 36 net new discovery calls in a quarter, 24 product demonstrations, 6 PoC planning/”EB go” conversations, and 4 PoCs. This breaks down to 3 & 2 (discos & demos) every week.
• The most important parts of MEDDPICC are identify pain and champion development (the person/people impacted by the pain).
• No business issue, no business.
• It has become hard(er) to differentiate on features; instead, explain how you differentiate on architecture in a way that not only gives you better performance but also unlocks your roadmap
• As features become more like for like, companies are working to differentiate on support – 24/7/365 service with extremely rapid response by high-caliber personnel

Philip van der Wilt #006

• Only join a company if they match your level of ambition.
• Join the company with the best product in the space (and who is also scaling the fastest).
• If you want to be an enduring company, customer success must be front and center at what you do.

Marina Ayton #005

• The core of my success in going 8 years achieving no less than 200% of target was doing 2 hours of pipeline generation (PG) every day. Having a full pipeline allows you to ask more difficult questions and thus qualify opps in and out much more aggressively.
• I look to hire people who are tenacious but not entitled.
• Start your forecast calls with, ‘What is the bad news? How can we solve it?’
• The fundamentals are:
  • Daily pipeline generation
  • Being exceptionally well-prepared for customer meetings
  • Represent our company
• Flexibility is earned
• Never be in a position where you have the ask for a promotion
• The best AEs learn their product and don’t over-rely on their sales engineers.
• To be the best rep in the company, you cannot feel entitled to a Monday to Friday, 9a-5p job.

Hash Choudhuri #004

• Throughout the sales process, prospects are judging your integrity and that of your company as much as they are evaluating your solution.

Marjorie Janiewicz #003

• Document the value drivers your customers are pursuing and especially how we deliver that value. Measure (granularly), manage, and optimize the business based on those principles.
• Diversity fosters diversity; people want to work with and for people like them.
• Years ago, great sellers were hungry, competitive, had a good network, and were extroverts. We have evolved and great sellers now must have empathy, the ability to ask great questions, active listening skills, and business acumen.
• If your quota attainment drops, reevaluate your capacity model
• Strive to maintain if not grow you sales productivity quarter over quarter
• Make sure you are clear [and aligned] on the ~2 positive business impact your solution generates. This must have the power to drive the prospect CEO & CFO to purchase your solution.

Graham Moreno #002

• There is a tight link between ‘verticalizing’ your sales team and success in selling to large enterprises.
• Strategic account management requires a very different skillset and mindset than hunting new logos

Luke Rogers #001

(some material here also from Luke’s Sales Confidence event presentation)

• When interviewing with Jeremy Duggan, Luke hand him his resume. After looking it over, Jeremy asked, “Why the f*ck would I ever hire you?”
• When I joined AppDynamics, I committed to being a zealot of the PTC/BladeLogic playbook. I also adopted a ‘do whatever it takes’ mentality.
• I just kept
  • Pipeline building
  • Champion building
  • Meeting more Economic Buyers
  • Doing more PoVs
• We held ourselves highly accountable to what counted as a new business meeting. Just coffee does not count. Discovery and demo meetings count.
• Inspire but enforce the playbook
• I knew if I ran 10 new business meetings, I’d get 6 potential opportunities. After doing technical deep dives, I’d qualify out 2 and be left with 4 legitimate opps. 2 would be urgent requiring a PoV this quarter and 2 would give me upside pipeline for next quarter.
• Revenue is the by-product of intentional activity today.
• Enterprise sales is a team sport. Your (sales) leadership team needs to align with executive peers at the prospect.
• Ambitious, brilliant A-players want to work with each other.
• Design simple, uncapped comp plans.
• “Obsess about the success of your champions.” In this day and age, we don’t sell software; our champions sell software.
• Never ever lower the bar on hiring.
• Sales leaders at a given level tend not to collaborate well with each other since they are competing.
• 3 Rs of sales leadership (in this order)
  • Recruitment – ICCE
    • Intelligence
      • IQ: Academic track record
      • EQ: Do they listen or do they just talk?
      • Street Smarts
    • Character: Resilience. Overcoming personal hardship. Athletes. Ex-military.
    • Coachability: Has somebody constantly put themselves in a situation where they want to acquire new skills?
    • Experience: It is very difficult to validate people’s past sales track record. Experience is intentionally the last on this list.
  • Retention
  • Revenue