Podcast episode
Hall of Fame: Krysten Conner
30 Minutes to President's Club22 Apr 202430 min
Description
FOUR ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS Start with a menu of pain: the 3 biggest problems that any given persona can face. Once you align on the problem, ask, “What’s prompting that need?”. You can start talking about solutions once you have an executive-level problem (e.g. down round, churn problem). Use individual contributors, like AEs, for inside intel on the organization. Then use their quotes on 1-2 slides when meeting with VP or CXO. PATH TO PRESIDENT’S CLUB Enterprise Account Executive @ UserGems Enterprise+ Account Executive @ Outreach Enterprise Accounts, Financial Services @ Tableau Software Strategic Accounts @ PowerSchool RESOURCES DISCUSSED Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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There's a number of ways to practice it, but what works for me is writing it down and saying it out loud. So I have a stack here of very ugly, nonconformist staff of probably 25 different things that are either second level discovery questions or points that I want to really be able to make succinctly in calls. And so I want to practice it just for muscle memory. “And I have time blocked off on my calendar to practice those.” Round us out. What's number three? So number three is create systems, right? Create ways to execute the things that are important. So we were talking before about that James Clear quote in Atomic Habits where he says, you don't rise to the level of your goals, but you fall to the level of your systems.
The second thing is you're establishing credibility and their comfort level goes up because you know the issues they're facing. They know they don't have to educate you. So you've earned trust, you've earned credibility, you've reduced the friction, “and they're primed to talk. And the third reason is it gives them room to correct you.” And people love to correct other people. They especially love to correct salespeople. And so you don't have to be 100% accurate. In fact, it's better if you're not. Because when they tell you, well, actually, yeah, I get that based on the market. But really, what we're dealing
You actually said things that were a little bit higher. So if I'm sitting here thinking about how I'm going to apply this to my sales work, how should I think about the way that I talk about those problems or initiatives? Yeah, that's really important. There's two different ways I think about it. The first one is their persona, right? Because all of us have buying committees “that have three to eight different personas or departments.” we deal with sales, sales officer, revenue operations, and marketing, and a VP of marketing cares about pipeline differently than a VP of sales, right? Who's really more interested in revenue, right? So I have to know who my audience is from a persona level. I also want to know who
that have three to eight different personas or departments. So that's the first way. Because if we deal with sales, sales officer, revenue operations, and marketing, and a VP of marketing cares about pipeline differently than a VP of sales, right? Who's really more interested in “So I have to know who my audience is from a persona level.” my audience is from a power line level. Skip Miller talks about above the line and below the line. So above the line means like generally director and above, VP and above. Above the line cares about risk. They care about market share. And you heard what I just said to him. They're worried
seconds. I think it speaks to the commonality of this scenario based on how fast that post took off on LinkedIn and all the comments that were happening around it. So this was a fairly early stage deal where we had talked with them a couple of times and then they kind of “I put them in a nurture sequence just to follow up giving them value-add kind of thought leadership” every once in a while. And he just responded out of the blue and he says, basically like, hey, the tool's great, but too expensive. Your best bet is to give me your bottom price and we'll just see if it works. And I was like, well, okay. So then the next thing I want to find out if price is the issue, is that the only issue, right? Like, do you love us? You just can't swing the price.