Challenging your customer to ensure the best mutual fit (Stephen Guerguy, Enterprise Sales Leader @ Monte Carlo)

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1. 13:04

   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. Especially if you're selling against startups, then that's like a huge advantage that you might have because maybe your competitors don't have as many customers that have been using it for 6, 12, 18 months. So not only do I get a technical leader within our organization to talk to the prospect, I'll also get a customer.

   In Customer reference programs

2. 14:25

   Now, when you bring in your CTO or when you bring in your PM, what have you, my guess is you're prepping them because they're not going to just come in and give the same boilerplate, here's the road map, right? You're probably having them come in to de-risk certain things. So I'm curious, what goes into prepping a PM to make sure that that call goes effectively? Yeah. “So if you're not building a prep doc, then you're doing it wrong.” So every single call that I have either a PM or an executive on, I have a fully built out prep doc. Easiest way to think of it is like who, what, when, where, why, how? So who are we talking to? What do they care about? How are we doing it? And then oftentimes I'll include gaps. And I'll be like, hey,

   In Account research briefs

3. 18:00

   next month or next quarter, then yeah, you're in a pretty disadvantageous position. And you might not be able to win that deal. So, I like to hit that head on and run towards that one. And so, like, hey, I know that we can only do about 50% of the stuff that you want to do. Does it still make sense to do a POC? Does it still make sense to ask for your time? “I want to be super respectful of your time.” Seems like we're just not there yet. And allow them to either A, stop the eval now and save your time and theirs, because you're not going to win it, or B, they'll actually start selling you on why you are uniquely positioned. Oh, hey, listen, like, it's not a big deal.

   In Disqualification messaging

4. 21:12

   So oftentimes I'll say like, hey, typically what we've seen is that like proof of concepts take about two to three weeks and then the customer ends up making a decision. Can you help me understand your time frame and like what you have in mind? And like, oh, wow, that's a little bit different from what we see. “Like, can you help me understand why that is?” Oh, it's a six month process. The thing around like the fear of like, oh, my God, what if I blow this one up and my competitor gets it? Oftentimes I find that that fear is the thing that's driving salespeople to pursue the wrong deals because they're like, I'm worried about my quota. I'm worried about my pipeline.

   In Objection diagnosis and probing

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