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

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