Podcast episode
Riding rising stars on the way to enterprise deals (Chris Surdi, Strategic Account Manager @ Ascend)
30 Minutes to President's Club9 Aug 202333 min
Description
Join the most tactical sales newsletter in the world: https://hubs.ly/Q01-R33G0 FOUR ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS Figure out your champion’s motives. This might look like supporting their business motives / aligning with their bonus/financial motives / or making them feel like they’re going to ink their next promotion. The Sandwich Sale: Combine the groundswell at the bottom of the organization with executive momentum at the top to squeeze the middle managers into action. Ask the executive: “Who’s your rising star?” They will often be the ones to drive your deal with the most velocity. Land a single deal for $50-100k, then build an internal business case to expand on the account. PATH TO PRESIDENT’S CLUB Strategic Account Manager @ Ascend Strategic Accounts @ Sourcegraph Head of Enterprise Sales @ Segment Enterprise Sales Executive @ Braintree (a PayPal company) RESOURCES DISCUSSED Join our weekly newsletter Things you can steal 30MPC Training: 30mpc.com/training
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What are the motives? and Smartlead.io. I'm Chris Surdi and I'm here to talk to you about the next generation of startups. We're going to dive deep into the next generation of startups and talk about the next generation of startups. And I'm going to talk to you about a few of the things that we're going to talk about today. So, let's start with the basics. The first thing is that you're going to want to understand what are the motives that they're trying to, or the C level priorities that they're trying to solve. And are they motivated by those C level priorities? “And then just as important, you want to understand the motives of the champion themselves.” Are they a sort of a tech person who's trying to make a name for themselves, right? Or are they just trying to align to whatever their bonus is so they can get the biggest, fattest bonus at the end of the year, right? Understanding and aligning to those will help you enable your champions to be successful. So Chris, some common discovery wisdom that we hear is you should be looking for business priorities, executive priorities.
But the reality is sometimes the champion might not care about those things, right? They might care about their own promotion. They might still get promoted if the company misses earnings for the next three quarters in a row. So you get onto a discovery call with a champion. How do you balance or prioritize finding business priorities versus finding their priorities? “So you have to qualify based on pain, gain, and compelling event, right?” And so yeah, that's med pick stuff. Everybody knows that. But I think the difference here is having more of a point of view on where is the industry going and are you and your company keeping up, right? How do you position yourself as a thought leader? Don't be arrogant about it. Don't come over the top.
point, you're getting through legal review, and you're becoming like you said, an official vendor so that you're now an approved vendor. Once you've done that, and you've landed, right, I'm a big believer in the land and expand, you cannot eat again, the whole elephant at once, you need to land and expand. But once you've landed, then here's what you do, you get an “internal case study written, that is metrics based, that is private and confidential. So they will” give you all of the ROI metrics. The challenge with public case studies is they can generally be vague, right? And you know, they help to save a bunch of hours or you know, we were able to remarket it, you know, recreate a lookalike audience and retarget this and it increased
What do I need to know? So you want to do a bunch of prep beforehand and absolutely either do drinks or dinner or lunch. But, hey, I'm going to be in town. Let's grab lunch. And then, hey, by the way, who else is on your team? Who do you think this is relevant to? “And here's the agenda topics. Here's what I was hoping to talk about.” Does this agenda look right to you? Because if it does, then I'll make sure I bring all the appropriate folks to the meeting. I'll bring all the appropriate material. I'll make sure I customize our conversation so that it's appropriate and we make the best use of time. You have to meet them in person to really understand, are we making an impact on the relationship?
You're a real human and you have emotions as well. And let them understand that you're there. Yes, because you're trying to sell them a product. Right. But you're more so there because you're trying to solve a solution and understanding if there's alignment. And I can't stress that enough. It's you are not there just to sell. “You are there to uncover if the solution that you offer aligns with the problems and challenges that are trying to solve.” And if so, can you work together to solve those and then have a fair economic exchange? So I would say 70, 80 percent is, you know, again, building rapport. But you do want to bring up like, hey, just not for nothing. How was that meeting or what should we expect for the meeting that we have coming up? And what do you really care about? What do you want to learn?
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