Focusing on discovery to close any deal size from Enterprise to SMB (Ian Koniak, Strategic Account Director @ Salesforce)

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1. 8:24

   make it personal to them and find out what's in it for them. This is kind of the motion that I follow in the enterprise sales. And I think if you're selling them in market, you can do the same thing. You get sponsorship, you go down. You don't want to engage the decision-maker the entire time, or they're going to get deal fatigue. You want to get their sponsorship, have them send out a letter to all their folks who you need to meet with explaining why you're “doing it, do your discovery, then come back up and basically tell them why they're broken and” how you can fix it. So Ian, I'm wondering if you can talk about the first step in this process. The first time that you meet with this C-level exec, you kind of have one shot, because if you show up and you're horrible, that person's not going to meet with you again. I'm curious, can

   In Co-selling roles and handoffs

2. 12:25

   implementing digital transformation for their organization. So I think we can deliver something similar to you, but I'm not going to make any promises until I understand how you're doing things today and really come back. And they're going to appreciate that. No executive, especially in the complex enterprise, will expect you. They'll laugh you out the door if you tell them “you can do things without discovery. All you're asking for and all you're selling is the permission” to go in and do deep discovery, because that's going to include very confidential stuff. They're going to show you how they sell. They're going to share some pain points with you that they probably don't want the street to know about. They're going to show you systems where there might be confidential data, right? So you're asking a lot when you're asking for permission to do deep

   In Discovery meeting structure

3. 17:17

   So how do you balance selling the dream and the vision while also not saying, hey, I get it, you're a fortune 500 company, but I'm not going to triple your market cap in the next two years. I think the key is co-author the business case, right? In general, I'm not even going to say co-author the business case. You need to co-author the proposal. You need to co-author the board deck. “You need to co-author every piece of content that they're using.” By co-authoring, what I mean is before you tell them this, you say, hey, here's what we think. I want you to put your fingerprints on it. So every time I close a deal, almost every time I have my champion or my exec sponsor looking over the deck, changing things, coaching us, making it their own. And oftentimes it's even on their template, right?

   In Co-branded content

4. 19:29

   I have people for that. And if we want, we can set up a separate call. My job is to make sure our products support what you're trying to solve for in your business initiatives. So if you want to talk technology, you want to understand, you know, speeds and feeds and features and capabilities, let's set up a separate call. I'll bring them in and just tell them they'll understand. All I need to know is enough to bring in my team and let them do their thing. “So it's really about that level is about finding the problem and then figuring out who on your” team is best equipped to solve it, but also knowing enough to say, well, API management is definitely something that I think, you know, benefit from, would you mind setting up a call? And we can dive a little deeper because I'm not the best person for this. I have an account executive and an engineer. I want to bring them in because I really do believe we can help you here.

   In Referral routing and stakeholder mapping

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