Know the Deals That You Are Actually Winning - Mark Tanner, Jonathon Blackburn, Kendra Berner - Revenue Today - Episode # 067

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.

Hello and welcome to today's webinar with our value partner Quiller. We are excited to, uh, get started here. I'll go ahead and start with introductions. I am Gina Guerreri. I am the Partner Success Manager here at RevGenius. Today, Mark Tanner, co-founder and COO of Quiller, is being joined alongside of Jonathan Blackburn, VP of Global Sales at Quiller, and Kendra Berner, Senior Strategic Account Executive at Lattice, and be going over how to close deals during a downturn. Uh, guys, you will want to take lots of notes. Please ask a lot of questions in our Q&A. Thank you so much for taking the time to attend our webinar today, and we will go ahead and, uh, turn it over to the deal closing experts.

Hello everybody, thank you so much, Gina, uh, John, and Kendra. It's just fantastic to be here with you. Hello friends, please do ask lots of questions. We would love to sort of have this be interactive and have lots of, you know, Q&A at the end of this. We're gonna run through this all now, but I think there'll be chances for Q&A at the end. So look, you know, I think from our side, the thing that's on everybody's mind here is, oh, Gina, we've just lost the slide. There we go. So I think the thing is everyone on everyone's mind here is that we are entering a changing world, and I think for those of us who've been in sales for a while, look, the last few years of selling have been some of the best we've seen in our career. There was a lot of people you know out there buyers. I think a lot of interesting stuff happening, and a lot of people feeling generally positive about the world and sort of growth and change. And obviously, you know, there were some COVID challenges as well in there. But I think you know the last few years have generally been pretty great, and I think that. We're entering into a new world. I think we sort of need to have a moment to pause and have a bit of a reset to sort of rethink about like, you know, go back to some of the fundamentals and also some new strategies about like what's the right way to approach sales in this era. I think it is getting hard. I think it's getting especially hard in tech, which is I think, you know, obviously where we are. There's a whole sort of ecosystem change happening around there at the moment. You know, right now Quiller is going through this, like budgets are being set for 2023 and finance is going through with a red pen and I think it's going to be a bit sort of more challenging to sort of find that budget sort of than generally. And look, I think like, you know, whether or not a recession happens next year, I think there's at least a decent chance of that happening. And so again, all of this is going to mean that it's harder for sellers to get the job done. You know, fear, uncertainty, doubt is nothing that sellers aren't aware of. But I would say that, you know, again, now is a time for us to sit back and reflect upon what those fundamentals are, what some of those right strategies are, and have a bit of a reset. The other sort of important thing to say here is that selling has also changed a lot in the past couple of years. And so I think the way that people did these resets in the past is sort of a little different now because we are— we do live in this virtual selling world. The other thing that's happened over the last few years especially, you know, has been this move towards virtual selling, this move towards online. There's much more research being done earlier on As well as frankly, you know, I think buyers having a lot more power in the process and a lot less contact time with reps. And so I think there's that also sort of colors, I think this sort of change in this sort of market and something we sort of want to make sure we touch on a little bit as well. So look, that's the intro done here. Let's actually sort of go and dive into, you know, what it actually means to sort of You know, to sort of change up here. So Gina, if you want to throw to the next slide. All right. I'm sure this is something that every, you know, if you're a sales rep, this is your sales leader has like said this to you, you know, millions of times, or if you've read the books, like this is one of those things that's out there, but it really is fundamental to doing well at sales, to like knowing, you know, knowing where you win. You know, I think most companies right now, there's been a bunch of reports out. I'm sort of looking in tech world, but a bunch of reports out that are sort of saying generically across the board, sales cycles are lengthening, win rates are declining. And I think, you know, as we have this transition, you know, in good times, a lot of mediocre deals can look decent. You know, I think things that, things that once are sort of on the edge of, of where your product or service is able to sort of add value, You know, a lot of them can end up being wins, even though it's kind of— it's a little bit marginal. But in bad times, you really kind of actually like really truly need to know, like, where do we win? Where are we excellent? Where is the spot that we have our sort of sweet spot? John and Kendra know I've got this terrible analogy coming. So here it is. One of the things that I've been sort of thinking about in this sort of zone is like, you know, if any of you are into like, you know, blackjack or poker or any of those sort of things, they're like, I think in the modern version of those games, It's a really sort of numbers-driven game, you know, playing poker or blackjack, and the best players always know how to score their hand. And so when you get a hand dealt, you sort of have this understanding of like, okay, this hand in this scenario has about roughly this percent chance of winning. And I think sort of having the same understanding with your deals matters as well, right? It's sort of looking at your pipeline and being like, oh, this particular deal, because of this particular You know, thing, whether it's to do with like industry or company size or region or there's a whole host of different possible things that can lead to this. It could be pain or use case or whatever. But this one, like we kick ass at this, like we're fantastic at this. We're gonna close this every day versus here's where it's a bit more marginal. It doesn't mean you can't work the marginal deals, but you do need to be honest about like where you spend your time and how you think about that. So I'm gonna shut up here. I've had, you know, a classic founder monologue to kick this off, but I'm gonna throw over to JB now. JB, how do you think about this sort of challenge? Yeah,

it's a fair question. I think there's a couple ways to look at it. Any, or not, I shouldn't say any, but most companies have a pretty good idea of what their ICP is. By ICP, I mean their ideal client profile. As you mentioned, Mark, that could be industry, it could be team size or company size you're selling into, it could be the problems you're solving, the location, a couple of things, or any number of those or all of those. So I think being really clear on what your ICP is, is important. If you are a sales leader or a sales rep or just a revenue leader and you, for whatever reason, don't have a clear idea of what that might look like for you, or you just want to validate that, I would urge you as an AE even to go through the deals you've won over the past maybe 6 to 12 months and look at the similarities in terms of how large are the deals, who are you selling into, how many people were involved in those buying cycles. And if you're a revenue leader and you feel like you have a pretty good idea of what your ICP is, but maybe you want to double down or look back on that, I would urge you to do the same thing across your team. Just to make sure that the types of deals that you believe and think you should be working are the ones you're actually winning. And you get a better feel for how you're actually winning those, which I think ties back to there can sometimes be a case of the deals we want to be working and the deals that we want to close versus the deals that we're actually winning and what that looks like. And so I think my recommendation there would be to look back and have an honest kind of look and perspective on what the difference is between where you want to be versus where you actually are winning and how you could influence that.

Yeah, I think that's a great point. And just to sort of double-click on that, I think if you're a rep on this call, it can be easy to sort of sometimes be like, oh, look, that's sort of— that's RevOps' job to figure out what that is, or that's, that's, you know, sales enablement's job or my VP's job or whatever. Like, No, guess what? You are a seller. Like, like the thing that matters for sales reps is like that, you know, you kind of have this funny relationship where you're sort of your own company, right? You know, Kendra is Kendra Co., right? Who like, you know, she, she much as she's part of the wonderful Lattice team, you know, she's also an individual contributor who like has a real control over how much comp she takes home. And it's like, you know, this little small business that you run. And I think like You've got to treat take it seriously, and I think if you don't feel like you have a good knowledge here, like you you should feel free to push RevOps or push push someone else on the team to figure it out. But also frankly, you know, you might just grab that smart other A friend of yours and just like have a chat and go through each other's deals and work through and be like, you know what? It just really feels like we do very well here, and we don't do well here. Like I would always just say, like don't yes, it's nice to have all the support you can, but but I would also just like. Take it into your own hands and like make sure you fully internalize so that you can quickly look at deals as they come in and be like, hey, this one feels like sweet spot, great. This one feels a bit marginal given my pipeline. Should I maybe just ignore this and just actually focus on the ones that are winners, or how should I think about it? And I think, I think knowing that is super important. Kendra, how— speaking of Kendra Co., how do you think about this?

No, I love it, Mark. Actually, the thing that came to mind for me with your great analogy is obviously everyone wants a royal flush, but like, how often does that happen, right? Like,

but

yeah, I'd love to share my opinion just coming from like the rep lens and doubling down even on what we were talking about and JB, what you were talking about with, you know, it's probably this balance, especially in the climate that we're in today, of going back to what's been repeatable and anchoring ourselves in that, but then also still being willing to think about how can I do things differently? it is going to be a harder sale, right? And so a story that comes to mind for me is, you know, working at Lattice, we emphasize in really strategic people programs and thinking about reframing Lattice not just as an HR technology, but more as an employee experience platform. And so when we think about even our ideal customer profile, we have a lot of tech partners, but we also spent the past couple of years targeting agencies since they usually have a lot of disjointed processes and a real high pain and high need. And so I think looking at your pipeline today, whether you're a rev leader or a rep, really emphasizing on like, where are my deals that have the highest pain points where I really dug deep into that pain funnel? That's also going to help anchor those deals to very specific events or pain that can then propel it forward.

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think the other thing is also, you know, I think sometimes one of the things we can also think about in downturns is having some degree of an idea around, you know, there might be some people that you've sold to in the past that had great win rates. Let's say perhaps in agency land, and sometimes there are certain industries that just get hit harder than others during downturns. And so sometimes you can be like, I know in the last couple of years we've kicked ass at A, B, and C, but actually C is going to have— I think they're going to have a really hard time over the next little while and just kind of be trying to be, as John sort of said earlier, trying to be honest with yourself, like about what the reality on the ground is and sort of what that looks like. Again, none of this means you shouldn't work certain deals. Like there obviously is a lot of different contexts out there and also frankly, like hard times are when great reps are made. And I think you can actually really prove yourself and sort of show actually this deal that looks like it's a, you know, 50/50 deal, actually I win 50/50. This is gonna make no sense, but I win 50/50 deals, you know, greater than 50% of the time. That sort of makes sense. I sound like the Anchorman quote anyway. But I think that sort of that side is great. All right. Let's flip over. So I thought— sorry, before we wrap up here, any final thoughts here? All right.

Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas. in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in RevGenius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side. Thank you.