Hall of Fame: Stephen Guerguy

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1. 6:11

   a lot of our competitors aren't SOC 2 type 2 compliant. So I'll ask a prospect or a customer, hey, so I noticed that SOC 2 type 2 compliance isn't on here or single sign-on. I would assume because you're a fintech company, or I would assume because you're a bank, or I would assume because you're a retailer like Nordstrom, that that's really important to you folks. “So is that part of the success criteria?” And now I've like reframed the conversation around my software as well as what we do probably better than the competition. One area that I sort of struggle where it's like, Armand, you asked that question about you don't have the table stakes. Might appear to be the table stakes features, and you're trying to sell on vision is when you get stuck talking to somebody

   In Competitive differentiation

2. 7:31

   where they're like, I don't wanna talk to you, fill out this doc, let us know if you're a vendor that can satisfy our needs or not. And it's usually run by a lower level engineering or analytical org. Oftentimes in preparation for this call, I'll try to have a fairly good guess “of who the economic buyer is.” And so that could be, in my case, a director of engineering, VP of engineering, a CTO. And if it's like a smaller org, it's probably the CTO. So oftentimes during that initial call, I might be like, hey, so I noticed your CTO Mary joined about six months ago. Is this on her radar? Is this a priority for her this quarter? Is it a next quarter priority?

   In Economic buyer identification

3. 7:46

   Oftentimes in preparation for this call, I'll try to have a fairly good guess of who the economic buyer is. And so that could be, in my case, a director of engineering, VP of engineering, a CTO. And if it's like a smaller org, it's probably the CTO. So oftentimes during that initial call, I might be like, hey, so I noticed your CTO Mary joined about six months ago. “Is this on her radar?” Is this a priority for her this quarter? Is it a next quarter priority? And try to understand if there is an economic buyer that's even involved or aware of this project, because if they are, then it's a higher priority. If it's not, then it's a lower level priority. And if you can't get past this like low level gatekeeper,

   In Economic buyer identification

4. 12:59

   And they're probably going to get access to the CTO. But if it's like a large enterprise and it's like a product-driven org like JP Morgan Chase, they probably want to talk to a product lead around like what's coming around the pike. So I involve my executives, especially on the EPD side in every single deal. So that's part of it. “The other thing that I'll do is I'll get prospects to talk to customers that have run similar evaluations, oftentimes have the same stack.” And then I prescribe it. I say, hey, listen, what we found over the, you know, God, we've done hundreds of these at this point. It's really helpful to talk to a customer that's actually gone through the process, gotten our software deployed, and has been successful.

   In Customer advocates

5. 24:50

   In a world in which you are not giving any discounts or commercial concessions, how do you hold people to very specific timelines to make sure that your month or your quarter doesn't get blown up? Yeah, so I'll try to figure this out as early as possible in the process to understand, “is there a real, natural, internal, compelling event?” If I'm selling analytics and their contract expires with the incumbent on June 30, then they need something Steve Guerguey, Intedat, Apollo, ZoomInfo, Cognism, Lusha, Hunter, UpLead, Clearbit, RocketReach, Seamless, Lusha, Alphalife,

   In Buying signals and triggers