Pitfalls, best practices, and unique ways to successfully run a POC (Adam O’Chart, Top AE at Gong.io)

Description

Listen

Quoted on this wiki

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

1. 4:24

   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.

   In Handoff readiness criteria

2. 14:52

   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

   In Slack and Discord outreach

3. 16:26

   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,

   In Post-event follow-up

4. 19:26

   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.

   In Quantified outcome proof

5. 23:14

   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.

   In Slack and Discord outreach

Quotes are verbatim and belong to their publishers. Where a quote has been translated, the original wording is kept below it.