Navigating Org Structures to Win Long-Term Deals with Chorus.ai Regional VP, Sales Nicole LaBarbera

Zoom and to come in. Thank you for joining this session. Really excited to have Nicole here.

Excited to be here.

Thank you.

Yes. Thanks for joining us. Let's go ahead and kick things off. So welcome to our next session. We have Nicole LaBarbara, the RVP of sales from Chorus.ai. She's gonna be talking about navigating org, org structures to win long-term deals. Nicole, thank you so much for joining us. Like I said, before I pass it over to you, just a couple housekeeping reminders for everybody. If you can go to the next slide. Yep, perfect. So to submit a comment, response, or a question for Nicole, you can use the Zoom chat box in the bottom of your toolbar. So just click on that chat and ask any questions. If you'd like to speak directly with the speaker, make sure your camera is on. If you're comfortable, you can come off um, mute and ask any question directly, or just raise your hand and Nicole will be happy to answer. Lastly, we want this to be an interactive 20-minute session, so encourage you to ask as many questions and soak it all up when you can. So last thing, these sessions are being recorded and will be available post-event. I will drop a link to our SASTR YouTube channel so you could subscribe and make sure you get notifications when the recordings go live. All right, Nicole, passing it over to you. Take it away.

Thank you, Caitlin. Really appreciate you having me here this morning. So nice to meet you all. I'm Nicola Barbara. I lead our strategic sales organization here at Chorus. I joined Chorus about 4 months ago and built my sales career over the last, you know, nearly 8-9 years at Responsys, Oracle, and Medallia prior to taking this role. And outside of sales and building high-perform, really collaborative teams, my passion for coaching extends into the fitness world, where I've been a trainer for boot camp, Pilates, and spin classes for more than 6 years. So I'm going to push us all to lean in and have a really lively conversation this morning. Hope you're ready. Now, if you're not familiar with Chorus, we're a conversation intelligence platform that records, transcribes, and analyzes all of your customer-facing calls to deliver insights across an entire enterprise organization. Now, these insights help improve revenue team performance by identifying what's working and not working across all of your talk tracks and playbooks. In order to improve coaching and ultimately just drive more deals to close. We also enable you to bring the voice of the customer to all of your strategic decisions, including how you enhance your product roadmap or how you're investing in marketing in a given month or quarter. And the goal of today's session is really to discuss how sales leaders can identify key stakeholders and more effectively engage decision makers to drive your deals forward. I really want to understand from all of you, what you're doing to prepare as more and more of the C-suite and senior leaders are jumping into deals. So if you're comfortable this morning, we'd love to start with introductions. If anyone wants to pop their camera on, say quick hello, you can come off mute, or you can just enter into the chat where you're from. Would love to see who's on the call. Don't be shy. Hi, Caitlin. Hi, Gautam. Hi, Ken. Welcome, everyone. Hello, Oliver from England. Fantastic. Barcelona. I love it. Love that we have this global community of leaders in this virtual room right now. Brian from Ireland.

Fantastic.

Awesome. Well, welcome everyone. We've got Spain. Hi, Asun. Fantastic, everyone. Well, I'm going to keep an eye on the chat as we go through. Reminder, this is a roundtable discussion. So if you want to come off mute, ask questions, or, you know, pose any ideas to the group, would love for that to be part of this today. And I'm just going to start off with a question for the group. Um, we're actually quickly run through the agenda. How about that? We just did introductions. Um, next we're gonna focus on, uh, when is the C-suite coming into deals? Um, then what is the benefit of inviting senior leaders early on? And how can you make sure your team is prepared? Really, really important. Finally, we're all going to lean in and brainstorm about the best way to engage your senior leaders who are joining your calls. So now I would like to pose a question to the group. Now, over the last year, I would love to understand if you've seen an increase in the C-suite joining your calls. So anyone in the chat would like to jump in, just a quick yes, no, or come off mute. Would love to understand if you've seen similar trends. No change. No change. Okay. Well, I'll share some, some of the stats that we've pulled and what we're seeing, but any, any other folks have any thoughts around an increase, decrease, or no change of the C-suite or senior leaders joining?

No?

Okay. So I'll just highlight a quick stat. And essentially what we've seen Actually want to go on. There we go. All right, Rocío has always been remote, so we've always had active participation. Great, thank you. Now, we've seen about 108% increase over the last year of the C-suite joining. And what we've been able to determine from analyzing all of the calls that, that we're looking at here at Chorus is that having the C-suite get involved can increase the likelihood of a won deal by as much as 38%. This is happening on the buyer side and the seller side. And why is that? You know, from a buyer's perspective, there's just a higher degree of scrutiny on budget right now. Senior leaders need to understand the value of their technology and exactly what is being added to the stack because we have to be a lot more thoughtful about expenses. And from the sales side, I think I'll lean on what Rocio is saying. When you're remote, right, you don't have the face-to-face interactions, and it's actually somewhat easier to get these folks to open up their calendar if they're not traveling, or you don't have to coordinate meeting rooms across a busy workplace. So we, and we have to anticipate, right, these senior leaders joining our calls is really the right thing to do, because we're winning more when they do get involved. So what I'm going to open up to discussion is a few ways to increase and maximize the C-suite participation in your deals, especially since the this is a trend that we think is here to stay, that we're going to start to see these senior leaders lean in more.

Right.

So let's go on to— yeah, we're really, we're seeing it actually across all segments here, Kaelin. So like I said, I lead our strategic enterprise team. I've seen this as a trend, and we're seeing it across SMB and mid-market as well.

Yeah.

Alright, so let's go on to the next slide here. Yeah, and really talk about how to increase that, that participation.

Right.

So from my perspective, we really hope that a senior leader is getting involved, because we know that there's a higher degree of likelihood to win the deal. But oftentimes they're joining without you even knowing it. Right. We're seeing this happen pretty often where they're just joining a call that maybe they weren't even on the invite to. So you and your team have to be prepared, right? 10% of the time that is actually happening where CEOs, CFOs are joining without being on that invite. So my question for the group, like, how common is this to be caught off guard? Has anyone experienced this? I can tell you I personally have in the last, the last 4 months since joining Chorus. And how are you preparing your team? See, sweetest, too scheduled, no pop-ins, feels a little micromanagement. Yeah, I mean, I, I've seen this come in where they're even driving meetings where I would be surprised where they've they've kind of driven a very, very senior person at a large enterprise company here in the States is driving the meeting for us. So, you know, one thing that we think about in preparation is just making sure that your team has the right talk tracks to be prepared if those people are scheduled to join or not scheduled to join. Right. So when we think about what does the C-suite care about, we have to be prepared to talk about financial concerns, about compliance, about security, any topic that's going to be really important for these very busy individuals. We have to make sure as leaders, we have those talk tracks built out for them. Right? And we think about very specific ROI, like how can we make sure that you speak to how your solution can solve a critical business problem that delivers on the bottom line, that drives real benefits that these executives care about. So this is another aspect of coaching that we're doing at Chorus and beyond, to really hone in on the business value and the ROI. Only join employee meetings if I'm asked to. Yeah. Yeah, Rocio, I appreciate you sharing that. I know from my CRO's perspective, I agree, he's very, very busy. I can see that. All right, any, any thoughts around preparation? What are you doing with your teams to make sure that they're able to talk the right talk with the C-suite, the C-suite, when it comes to ROI or compliance or security? How are you preparing your teams? That's okay if we don't have the answers this morning. I would encourage you to take back to the rest of your organization, really think about how you are preparing the team adequately. Rocio, a lot of role-playing going on. That's— yep, briefing documents, prep documents, role-play.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, Susie, absolutely. We really want to understand the customer and their problem and their OKRs to make sure that we're matching how we're talking about our solution to what the customer cares about. Absolutely. Awesome. I really appreciate the engagement from everyone. So, so speaking of engagement, let's talk about how do we make sure that when that person joins, again, scheduled or unscheduled, that they're engaged in participating, right? So really this comes down to how do you get them talking? And we find that when members of the C-suite join and they talk almost 10% of the time, that 8.5% mark, we win more deals. So talking more means higher engagement means they have more to share about their problems and that we have a higher likelihood to connect our solution to what they care about. Right. And what I see as a sales leader is that this can sometimes be a challenge for reps. Right. Again, I, I'm going back to what people shared. We throw a lot of prep material at our reps. Talk tracks, role plays, all of the playbooks we give them from an engagement or enablement perspective. So how do we train them to think on the fly? Curious how you guys are tackling this, and what types of engaging questions are working for you to engage senior leaders or those key decision makers? Yeah, you know, one of the stats we see here is that deals that progress to the next stage have at least 5 engaging questions. And here at Chorus, we really define that as when you're able to get your prospect at any level talking for over 30 seconds and leaning in and sharing that valuable information. I can share an example that, that we've pulled here, but any questions that you've found to just be universally helpful at getting senior leaders talking? Tell me about your goals, growth, revenue for the upcoming fiscal year. Thank you, Kenneth. You know, a lot of that information too, Kenneth, like we can find through research, we can find through those 10-Ks, those quarterly earnings, and we can train our reps to actively look at that and show that we've done our homework. Always ask the why questions. Absolutely, Rocío. I love that. Every time they answer, it's interesting, but why?

Yep.

Yeah, I mean, just a question that we see work really well across our, all of our sales organization is, hey, if this problem were solved immediately, what would the impact to the business be? Right? So getting them to not only tell you what the problem is, right? Doing your homework to understand and show that you have a hypothesis around that. But getting them to quantify the impact for you will separate you from the rest of the sellers out there who just want to sell on a feature function or a use case perspective. Love this, Susie. Why is this important for you now? And what, what specific goals you have in the next 90 days? Exactly driving that urgency. What happens if you don't do this now? So reframing this to not only put the impact in a positive way, but also highlighting the risk of not doing anything. Perfect. Yep, Kenneth, digging into the cost of the current issue. Absolutely. So I mean, you guys are putting some really thoughtful questions here into the chat. I love them all. The takeaway for me is that we just have to ask open-ended questions. We have to get them talking. Thinking about hitting that 8.5+ percent mark to drive a higher likelihood of a won deal is absolutely critical. So first and foremost, we can train our reps up to, to the nth degree on product and security and compliance, but we really want to make sure they know how to ask open-ended questions that will provoke real thought and really help us drive to impact for the C-suite.

Appreciate this.

Question from Kaylin: Does bringing in the C-suite from the seller side help close deals, or does it make you look too small? Our best practice that we recommend and what we do is to match whoever is on the call at that seniority level. So we've seen on the seller side, again, across all of our customers, and all the calls that we analyze, seller side C-suite participation is up about 29%. So, you know, I think matching at the correct authority level is absolutely critical. Yep, absolutely, Susan— Susie.

Perfect.

So we'll go on here to the third point, knowing your audience. So you all have said it time and time again, Rocío, I don't join meetings unless it's scheduled, I don't have time. And if you do, I'm sure you don't have a lot of time to prep. And on average, we see that the C-suite is spending just about 3.5 to 6 minutes reviewing materials on a live call. What they care about more though, oftentimes, is seeing a demo, and that's 4.5 times more, right? And what we've analyzed, again, here at Chorus is that being overly reliant on your slides or on your PowerPoint or on that perfect talk track it just rarely gets you to the next stage. You have to be very flexible in your support. And when you have a senior leader on the call, you have to be able to move fluidly between what they care about, how— what they stated the impact is, and then be able to demonstrate real value. So I'm curious here. I know, especially as we're growing our sales team, we do have to have very structured pitches and PowerPoints here. But is— are there any objections about cutting slide content short from getting straight to a demo. I'm curious what's worked for the group. Do you find that your teams are, you know, audible ready, to use a force management term? On a first meeting, I would never do a demo. Yeah, you need to align needs. I agree with that, Rocio. Agree, Kaylin. If you skip discovery and go straight to a demo, it ends horribly. Yeah, you have to anchor on what's important. For sure. Does anyone separate the— how they present their demos out to various groups or buyers across an organization?

Yeah.

Yep. What do you show on the demo without understanding the problems? A demo is a waste. Absolutely. You just end up demoing a bunch of features and functions that may or may not be relevant. So getting that upfront discovery and what's important, not only to the C-suite, but every level and person that you're engaging with is absolutely critical.

Got it. Yep.

Awesome. I appreciate the engagement, everyone. We want to just quickly walk through the final takeaway here, and then we'll wrap up. But yeah, I agree. I think that in that first call and doing that discovery upfront to understand what's really important is absolutely critical. But making sure that our reps are not overly slide dependent and do have flexibility to jump into a demo at a later stage if a C-suite participant is involved has been absolutely critical, and we're finding that it's driving a lot of success.

Great.

All right, so we're going to wrap up here and just walk through the final takeaways. I really appreciated everyone's engagement in the discussion. First and foremost, we have to be prepared. And we have to be able to speak to different members of the C-suite, even if they're not on the invite, we should always prepare as if they might join. As rare as it might be, we know that when they do join, we're winning about 38% more of the time. We also know that we need to get these individuals talking, need to ask those engaging questions, those why, those tell me more, the what's the impact questions. And we have a higher likelihood of closed one deals when we do. And then finally, right, tailor your presentation and concerns to specifically what that C-suite or senior-level leader really cares about. Right? Don't be overly dependent on slides, be flexible if the demo is the right thing to do, but always make sure that you understand the critical business problem and are prepared to speak to the value that your solution is going to drive. So I appreciate everyone's participation. If there are any other questions, I would love to hear from the group. And thank you for joining and participating. The 5 key questions that CHORUS teams ask. Hmm. So I think we're— referred to earlier in the PowerPoint, Yeah, I would say it's very— Susie, I'll just end here— that it's very dependent on who we're speaking with and at what stage in the sales cycle we're at. But those why questions, those tell me about current state, the how does this tie to impact, what would happen if you were able to solve this, what would happen if you didn't solve this, those are really where we focus our discovery and our ability to get individuals talking. Yeah. Thanks, Susie. If anyone has additional questions, you know, again, we come with a lot of research based on what we're hearing in the field and across all the conversations that we analyze. Please don't hesitate to reach out. And I've truly enjoyed being with you all.

Nicole, thank you so much.

This is amazing.

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