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

Description

Listen

Quoted on this wiki

Every place a page here uses this source, in the order the words come in it.

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. 10:15

   We're open to meeting. Then it's really about, you know, coming prepared. So coming prepared with the questions you're going to ask, coming prepared with a point of view on how you believe you can help them based on what you've already heard or researched, and coming prepared, most importantly, “with questions that you want to ask them that will uncover whether there's a need that you” can help with or a problem that you can solve. With that first meeting, it's all about just literally listening to them and learning about what they care about and just taking a genuine interest and then making sure you kind of plant some seeds along the way so they know that, you know, that you can help in some of these things, right? So it's important to kind of

   In Discovery question design

3. 13:57

   So for this business case, it was a real estate company and the business case foundation, think of it as like the left side of it's one slide. It's an executive summary. It's an executive summary. You're like, here are your key goals. Here's your challenges. Okay. So it's kind of like paints the picture of here's what you're trying to do. Here's why you can't do it. Right. “And then we get into the goals are really like the outcomes they're trying to drive the outcomes.” So the goal for this real estate agency, we sold them CRM for 50,000 of their users. It was one of the largest deals we did at the time. It was a few years ago and it was a Berkshire Hathaway home services. And so every one of their agents was going to get Salesforce CRM and that was a

   In Outcome-based value propositions

4. 15:32

   Well, it might be that we're giving them mobile access, right, to get all their customer data in one place. It might be that we're giving them marketing campaigns where they can reach a much greater number of people. It might be that we're giving them some type of contact management where they'll, you know, be able to input what they're doing and who they're doing it with, you know, directly from voice. “So it's like these set of capabilities are going to deliver each of these specific business” cases. And then what we do, the last section of this is we input benchmarks. So we say based on the average salesperson productivity or average agent productivity, reps that use Salesforce, A's that use Salesforce are selling on average 30% more.

   In Feature-to-benefit translation

5. 16:35

   And we usually will use the conservative. And then finally, we'll take their specific metrics and say, hey, if you have 50,000 agents and you are to increase their average selling price by 10%, what would that do for revenue? We'll back out profitability on top of that. And that'll be kind of the foundation for our business case. So it's very detailed. “It's using their numbers, it's comparing benchmarks, but it all starts with the outcomes that they're” trying to drive that this solution is going to help them achieve. Ian, I'm curious on this case, I've tried to do ROI analyses in the past and sometimes it goes really well, but then other times it's like, okay, you're basically telling me I'm going to generate $17 billion in value. And these numbers are absolutely out of whack or it doesn't work for me.

   In Quantified outcome proof

6. 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

7. 18:12

   We're not going to go from a billion to 5 billion. We're very blessed and fortunate to have an awesome business value services team that helps our clients with these business cases because all business case is, all it is, is a way that they can sell it to their CFO. That's really what it comes down to, their CEO. They're going to do it. They're going to want to do it no matter what. “So if you can make it easy for them to say, hey, we're going to get this ROI, then obviously” they're going to want to work with you to make the numbers something they can defend. So that's why it's key to coauthor it with them. One thing I'm kind of curious about Ian is like, you have so much in your bag and you've been at Salesforce a long time, but like, you can't know everything about everything. And sometimes I get put in these like awkward situations where I get somebody who's like

   In Economic value propositions

8. 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