Podcast episode
Pitfalls, best practices, and unique ways to successfully run a POC (Adam O’Chart, Top AE at Gong.io)
30 Minutes to President's Club17 Feb 202127 min
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Join the most tactical sales newsletter in the world: https://hubs.ly/Q01-R33G0 Four Actionable Takeaways: Set up your exit criteria before you even touch the POC Let the prospect set the expectations for the pilot first Focus on your power users (champions) and your non-users (the converts) Get everyone on the pilot into a shared Slack channel for multi-threading Adam O’Chart’s Path to President’s Club: Top producing AE at Gong.io RESOURCES DISCUSSED Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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It's a different experience than it was before COVID. So making sure that someone's excited to talk to you is really important. I go backwards by trying to do a little research on these individuals. It's a little bit creepy, a little bit stalkerish, but I look at their LinkedIn, get a feel for what they're like as a person. I'm an athlete, right? I like to bike. If they're on Strava, I'll find them. “Find anything you can about them to breach just a little bit of fun small talk to kick” things off. Alrighty. So we've got to dig into this POC thing. We haven't talked about it a ton. And so oftentimes, unless you're like Gong, where it's super easy to spin up a pilot, POCs can eat up engineering resources. And so you want to make sure that there's commitment. And so could you talk about first, at what point in your sales cycle are you saying now
How you're setting the expectation early on that it is our responsibility to have a successful pilot. And we cannot do that without truly understanding what's going to drive success for their business. When you can align on that, and I think that get them to understand that we're investing in this project together. And the idea is to make it successful. You have every right in the world to slow things down and say, hey, maybe I missed the “mark, but I don't feel like we have enough meat on the bone here.” Right? What are we missing? What are we solving for? I think it comes down to like equal business stature, right? You need to truly believe that your time is as valuable as theirs. And if you don't, you're just not going to be set up for success. You're going to let someone drive the cycle and you're just going to get steamrolled. I say that because it's happened to me plenty of times.
How you're setting the expectation early on that it is our responsibility to have a successful pilot. And we cannot do that without truly understanding what's going to drive success for their business. When you can align on that, and I think that get them to understand that we're investing in this project together. And the idea is to make it successful. You have every right in the world to slow things down and say, hey, maybe I missed the “mark, but I don't feel like we have enough meat on the bone here.” Right? What are we missing? What are we solving for? I think it comes down to like equal business stature, right? You need to truly believe that your time is as valuable as theirs. And if you don't, you're just not going to be set up for success. You're going to let someone drive the cycle and you're just going to get steamrolled. I say that because it's happened to me plenty of times.
Then off of that, something that's actually really interesting that I noticed is oftentimes that's not aligned with what we talked about in discovery. Right? So you can pull back and say, well, I'm a little bit confused. Your success criteria is rep adoption, yet you're telling me that we need to show you in surface competitive intelligence in late stage deals, right? I feel like we should align those two. “So from the discovery that we ran, we can guide their success criteria towards” something that we know we can show, right? And that's the other part. The third thing I'd say is also, they need to know that a POC is, is to give you a glimpse into the power of the platform, it's not to deliver what you get from a full deployment over the course of, you know, 12 to 24 months. So make sure that if they say, Hey, we really need to execute on truly
the business case deck or the go, no-go deck right around, hey, this is why we should move forward after the PFC. Something that I didn't do early that I'm doing now is putting testimonials from the end users themselves, right? People are investing in our solution so that their team is really excited about it, right? And if the reps themselves aren't raving for it, it's just not “So something I've done is gotten testimonials from the end users” themselves, gotten the permission to use it and baked it into my slide deck. It literally, I feel like every single time I've done it, it's caught people by surprise. Like, oh, interesting. Cool. It's good to know that so-and-so feels that way. That's awesome. I mean, one of the things that I love that you're doing is you're like, you're trying to convert like the grumpiest person on
all the dates and has all the deliverables. You can comment on those sheets if you're using a Google sheet. So it's a good medium to communicate with people. That's on the other end. It's different from actual calls. And yeah, that's like a really, really powerful way that I've been able to drive those timelines. The last thing that I'll highlight as well, I don't do this “enough, but when I do, it's always, always successful is shared Slack channels. That's” another medium that I use quite often where I'll reach out to someone and say like, hey, your team is going to have a ton of questions and you're going to be the conduit in which they ask them. I can take the noise away from you and put everyone in a room together in a Slack channel. And on that, I can work with them directly. Something that's cool. shared slack channel, everyone that's on it, you can DM. So now it's like, boom, now I
different from actual calls. And yeah, that's like a really, really powerful way that I've been able to drive those timelines. The last thing that I'll highlight as well, I don't do this enough, but when I do, it's always, always successful is shared Slack channels. That's another medium that I use quite often where I'll reach out to someone and say like, hey, your team is going to have a ton of questions and you're going to be the conduit in which they ask them. “I can take the noise away from you and put everyone in a room together in a Slack channel.” And on that, I can work with them directly. Something that's cool. shared slack channel, everyone that's on it, you can DM. So now it's like, boom, now I have direct access to everyone where they're communicating, right? It's, it's really, it's a life hack. It's kind of a Trojan horse. That one is freaking money, dude. We do this with our customer success folks. And every
different from actual calls. And yeah, that's like a really, really powerful way that I've been able to drive those timelines. The last thing that I'll highlight as well, I don't do this enough, but when I do, it's always, always successful is shared Slack channels. That's another medium that I use quite often where I'll reach out to someone and say like, hey, your team is going to have a ton of questions and you're going to be the conduit in which they ask them. “I can take the noise away from you and put everyone in a room together in a Slack channel.” And on that, I can work with them directly. Something that's cool. shared slack channel, everyone that's on it, you can DM. So now it's like, boom, now I have direct access to everyone where they're communicating, right? It's, it's really, it's a life hack. It's kind of a Trojan horse. That one is freaking money, dude. We do this with our customer success folks. And every
access to our platform, typical marketing product. Everyone wants to know what's happening. The third tier of that is going to be the rep training itself, right? So in those exact trainings themselves, I then follow up again with that post email saying, Hey, here's a link to the call. Here are the main things we talked about. And that right there is like “my gateway to everyone. So from there, I'll single thread all those people that I want” to talk to. And I talked about personally going after the power users and the people that aren't there. So maybe the people super involved in that training session, and maybe people that didn't say anything, didn't have their camera on, right? Hey, Armand, Candidly Gong is a super powerful tool for people in your role. I'm sure you're super busy, probably multitasking, but if you had any specific questions that you weren't comfortable asking,
mentioned this slide deck a couple times too. And you're putting all this stuff together and building a larger business case and presenting it to the team. So my guess is you're not sending them 17 slides with all of your customers' logos on there. So what's actually going into that business case deck? It's going to essentially have a highlight of the things that we discussed that they “A recap of what those things look like and how we're able to quantify them.” A good instance is someone will ask us like from a competitive perspective, how many of our ops are being impacted truly? Because CRM isn't telling them that, right? We can sit down with them in a prep meeting and actually surface that within our UI. Leveraging that, getting permission to steal screenshots from those sessions is really powerful, including those in.
Number three, when you start that pilot, focus on your power users and focus on your non-users. If you can convert some of the non-users to users, that is 10 times more powerful than the person who was already your biggest fan. And then lastly, number four, Nick's favorite, the Slack channel. “When you're working on a pilot, open up that Slack channel with one of your prospects.” Get everybody in that pilot in your Slack channel.