The Impact of AI on Sales with James Underhill
- AI is most helpful for accelerating administrative work and research so that AEs can focus more time on the human work of engaging prospects & customers. [Underhill]
- Reps must build relationships, do homework on corporate goals, building cost justifications, influencing decision criteria, understanding politics, and buyer motivations. These things require human interaction and are beyond the scope of AI. [McMahon]
- Predictive AI is great for account prioritization. [Underhill]
- AI does not replace managers; rather, it is a tool to support better decision making. [Underhill]
- AI should allow managers to operate with larger spans of control. [JD thought as I listen]
- AI cannot replace critical thinking, curiosity, and hunger/persistence. [Underhill]
- Provide reps with an AI trained on your product documentation so they are better equipped to answer questions and will consequently build greater trust with customers. [Underhill]
- AI-based outbound will generally look the same. This will disengage buyers from digital messaging and make warm introductions even more valuable. [Underhill]
- We [MongoDB] have a tool that allows CSMs to engage customers with, ‘Hey, we noticed that you’ve done x and y but you have not yet taken advantage of z. Should we hop on a call so I can show you how to do that?’ [Underhill]
The Path to Sales Leadership: Lessons Learned at Each Management Level with Carl Cross
- (McMahon) Second line managers are responsible for teaching the first line manager how to:
- Recruit
- Analyze rep skills and and knowledge
- Train reps
- (McMahon) For reps to be successful in your company, you need to hire right, coach right, and lead right.
- As a CRO, the last thing you want to do is get behind on your hiring plan.
Three Traits of a Successful Revenue Partnership with Alan Chhabra
- Evaluate a potential partnership based on 3 customer benefits?
- Will the partner help deliver and support our software better?
- Does it help the customer have an ecosystem of tools that work with my software so they can build solutions faster?
- Does the partner help my customer procure our software in all parts of the world?
- You need resellers to go-to-market in the public sector and in Asia.
- I don’t believe in marketing-only partnerships.
The Startup CEO with Jeremy Burton
- Optimism is a force multiplier in a startup.
- The engineering team should build what the sales team feels the big blockers are. That being said, sales should tell the engineers the problem and let the engineers solve it rather than telling them what HOW to solve the problem or WHAT feature to build. [22:00 & 36:00]
- In large enterprise, it is harder to get meetings but the value proposition is stronger
Loyalty and Culture with Hollie Castro
(This was a short HR related conversation, not directly GTM)
Business Value Assessments: Looking at Opportunities through a Value Lens with Doug May
- At the beginning of the sales process, slow down to speed up
- The process the customer has typically requires some form of financial justification. If you cannot provide it, you leave it up to two other people – the customer has to do it on their own or your competitor is going to do it and box you out. [8:12-8:32]
- Discovery does not stop when the customer tells you they have a project that needs what you sell. When that happens, the salesperson gets the happy ears because they have been taught to go find projects. Keep swinging the axe. Why do you have that project? Who sponsored that projects? What business problem does it solve? Keep digging until you find links between your critical capabilities and the challenges the customer has. [13:00-13:57]
- If someone asks you about a feature, answer and follow with, “Why does that matter to you?”
- If you start pushing product early on, you instantly lose credibility.
- John Kaplan on meeting structure [36:14-37:38]
- Purpose: The purpose of the meeting is…
- Process: Here is what I’m going to take us through…
- Payoff: And the benefit to both of us is…
- The definition of a business is that it is a reason for change.
- Purchasing does not want to be the cause of failing to achieve a strategic initiatives [56:03-58:04]
- 3 key sections of the BVA:
- List of all people you met (dates, names, titles)
- Quotes about the current state and/or your solution
- The (negative) business impact of a single specific incident the prospect experienced
Moving into the CRO role with Kelly Connery
- As a CRO, you need to be in some ways a CIO because there are so many great technologies out there… You have to be good at leading cross-functionally whether your own Marketing and retention or just sales.
Scaling Sales at a Startup with Chris Reisig
- As an early stage CRO, you are a sales professional and a product manager at the same time.
- If you cannot find pain at your customer that is acute in your customer, you have to keep looking. (5:16)
- It is one thing if you and the founder can go out and do 10 deals, but unless you can teach other people to take a deal from first presentation to PO then you don’t have a repeatable business. If a founder can turn to me and say “Hey, the last 5 deals we did… I only came in to shake hands at the end,” then you there is something there. (7:19)
Selling the Vision with Devdutt Yellurkar
- You have to earn the right to be asked for help. You do this by listening, by not judging, and by only helping when you are qualified to do so. When you are not qualified, find someone else who is.
- Founder CEOs will relentlessly pursue their vision. Non-founder CEOs will change the vision when they hit a wall.
- User buyers have gained tremendous power in the software decision making process.
Breaking Down the Traits of a Champion with Anna Gary
- Start opportunity reviews with an org chart that shows both authority and influence.
- To find a champion, look for people who are tasked with leading change.
- There are both business champions and technical champions.
- The biggest difference between a coach and a champion is that the latter has the willingness and ability to access the economic buyer. – John McMahon
- Coaches tend to ask questions around technology fit; champions tend to ask questions around business impact.
Focus on the Fundamentals with Paul Ohls
- It is all about the quality of the people that you bring into your organization. Give hiring managers a set of interview questions to test for key attributes including (ICCE):
- Intelligence: Listen for the qualify of questions people ask you about your business and the value of your products.
- Character/Drive: Walk me through a time when you were tempted to throw in the towel but persevered – personal or professional.
- Coachability: Go through every job a person had and ask them what they learned a long the way. What did you learn there and why did you leave?
- Experience
- It is a red flag during an interview process when people don’t take ownership for failure. They blame a bad boss, a bad product, etc.
- If you work in a location geographically remote from headquarters, esp. in a different country, selling may not be as ‘different here’ as you think.
- No matter what situation you come into as a new leader, there are going to be pockets of success. Dive in to understand the approaches of the people who have been successful in those functions.
- Optimize your sales process by asking customers why they bought. Go deep – why did they take the first meeting? The second meeting?
- As a new sales leader, show up with a playbook written in pencil rather than in permanent marker. Update it by diving into what has worked for that company in that market for that product set at that price point with that buyer persona.
- Adjust probabilities by source (ex: AE self-sourced; channel; inbound; etc.)
- Sales leaders must block out time every week to reach out to great candidates
- Never take shortcuts when it comes to recruiting – John McMahon
- The economic buyer (EB) in most organizations right now is the CFO.
- Track critical conversion rates such as advancing from 1st new business meetings to 2nd technical deep dive discussions. This should drive your enablement focus.
- Track pipeline generation in the trailing 90 days at the company, team, and AE level.
- Productivity per ramped rep is the ultimate metric.
Key Points in Snowflake’s Growth with CRO Chris Degnan
(key takeaways coming soon)
Reducing Customer Churn with Pawan Deshpande
- Things CSMs say when there is a culture of futility:
- ‘We reach out to the customer 3x and they never responded.’
- ‘Sales oversold the product.’
- ‘The product is flaky.’
- Merge AEs and CSMs into pods so that CSMs are involved in active deals.
- Have Product and CS train and certify AEs on how the product works.
- Types of customer support/success:
- Support: Addresses an acute point issue
- Onboarding: Optimize for adoption
- Business Reviews: Periodic, proactive look at the whole health of the account
- Critical Care: Monitor the account for signs that something may be off and proactively engage. Examples:
- low utilization – no usage in last 14 days
- unpaid bills
- broken 3rd party integrations
- low NPS or CSAT
- extremely negative support tickets
- power user or admin changes
- Acquisition of company
- Champion departure
- Major management change
- During onboarding, strive to identify multiple champions so you can react more effectively if/when your primary champion leaves.
Coaches vs. Champions with Anne Gary
- A champion is someone with power & influence in the organization. They take action on your behalf. [JM]
- Power is access to an economic buyer who has discretionary control over the budget [JM].
- People with influence have experience in the organization as ‘change agents’
- In your deals, identify & develop both business champions and technical champions. Business champions focus on outcomes and they rely on technical champions to evaluate the solution. [JM]
- Coaches are not a waste of time but they are not sufficient to win a deal. Coaches look through the eyes of product fit and technology. Coaches don’t take action on your behalf.
- You will get relegated down to the person you sound like. [JM]
- Is your champion stronger than the competition’s champion?
Execute a Winning Strategy with Chuck Bamford
- Half of strategy is not frustrating your customers relative to what they can get with competitors; these elements are table stakes. The other half is coming up with 2-3 things that are true competitive advantages then aligning the whole organization around .
- Customers compare you to competitors every day.
- Continue to analyze two types of competitors: (5 competitors is sufficient)
- Those you bump into in every deal
- Those on the fringe who are doing innovative things
- Company strategy must be converted to KPIs. Those KPIs must then be converted to the activities frontline workers do every day.
- If you ask me to do something that does not help my sales people sell more, then I will say no… it will not be one of my priorities. [JM]
- During challenging times, double down on your strategy.
- John McMahon’s ICP process
- start with your competitive diffentiators
- ask, ‘Which pain points do those differentiators solve?’
- What use cases are those pain points in?
- Who owns those use cases?
- How are those people measured in their job?
- What is a reasonable value for helping them achieve those measures?
- Point your salespeople at those companies and those personas who place the maximum value on the solved pain.
- New features must become a new differentiator or enhance an existing one. [JM]
- A startup can only focus on 3-4 use cases. [JM]
- A company does not have a healthy culture if it does not invest in training is employees and ensure its people can achieve their target earnings. [JM]
- A differentiator must (1) have clear, provable value to the customer and (2) be something your competitor truly does not have. It is not sufficient to just have a feature that your competitor does not. [JK]
- Do win reviews: [JK]
- Why did you buy from us?
- Where are not as good as we think we are?
- Where are we better than we realize?
- What seller would have bought from if they had a better product? Always be recruiting.
- Sellers must influence your differentiators into the buyer’s Decision Criteria. That only happens if they acknowledge the differentiator creates value by solving a pain point. [JM & JK]
Selling to the CFO
- Murray Demo, 6 time CFO
- I would only meet with a sales person at the request of one of my peer executives and only once the deal nearly final. I expect my peer to sell to me.
- Purchases that reach my desk are large enough to cut across my company. I need to know the teams affected are committed to business process change. I spend more time around that than squeezing the last dollar out of the price.
- Jim Kelliher, Drift CFO
- Each quarter, we look at:
- Top line growth in new business & expansion
- Productivity of new reps and ramped reps
- GDR & NDR
- Employee attrition and ramped quota capacity
- Cash burn
- Forecasts need to be sensitive to rep ramp time
- Missing your forecast is a sign you don’t truly know you are accounts. – John McMahon
- Each quarter, we look at: