Rising to the C-Suite Challenge: Equip Your Team to Win High Stakes Deals with Chorus CEO Jim Benton

here to talk with us about Rising to the C-Suite Challenge: How to Equip Your Team to Win High-Stake Deals. I know I sound like a broken record, which you guys have heard me all say over and over again, but we have a few housekeeping items, even though it's the last session of the day. One thing to keep in mind is this is a 30-minute session, just like all the others. We want you to keep your cameras on. We want you to be interactive. So I appreciate you guys that have those on. For this one, we want you to preferably go into the chat for all of your questions if you can. That would be a great place for us to collate those and, and be able to take the questions as needed. As a reminder, these sessions are recorded. And last but not least, we have a networking app that I'm sure you guys have heard us talk about that does one-on-one meetings, and it will be ongoing throughout the week, and I will link that in the chat. So again, please be interactive, please have fun. Thank you guys for sticking out for this last roundtable of the day, and I'm going to turn it over to Jim. Thank you for being here, Jim. We appreciate it. We know it's, it's a late day, and we're really glad to have you.

Caitlin, thank you. Appreciate it, and welcome everybody. Appreciate you taking time to join us, and yeah, encourage interactivity here. So Chats are welcome. Keep it coming. Get the videos on if you're comfortable doing that. We're virtual and we're a big fan of using chats even in our all-hands. Just a little bit about me. You know, I've got a DNA in sales. I just have loved sales in the sense that you get a front row seat to the toughest challenge out, out in the industry. And that's what sales is about, solving these problems. I got my career start at Evite.com. How about this? We'll test the chat. Anybody an old Evite user out there? Evite.com. Oh, I like the hand raised. We're already getting their activity going. Yes, on the Evite. So I got my start at Evite, which led me down 10 years of ad tech in the media side. Evite was acquired by Ticketmaster and held different roles there around the country. Great to see some Evite folks. And then made it into enterprise SaaS when I co-founded ClearSlide back in 2009, right after the market had crashed. So I've seen this story before, but we built a beautiful company, and hopefully many of you have used ClearSlide in the past. We were early in the sales engagement space, raised $90 million in capital, and just a great overall experience. And that led me down the path of continuing to focus on solving these challenges and building these iconic teams. I was CEO at Apollo.io, and that led me— we were a customer of Chorus— to a great opportunity to join Chorus March 16th. So speaking of March 16th, unique time to be joining, and this will tie into the data of today. But when I joined Chorus, you know, I was talking to Chorus, the stock market was at 29,000. When I started and joined Chorus, Within 3 days, the market tanked at 18,200. In just a very short period, everything changed. I went from thinking I would start and work in a San Francisco office to I still haven't been to the office yet here in the Bay Area. But I'll tell you, one thing that was led to the topic we're going to get into today is that on day 3, I realized that the world had changed. We were working remote. There was a lot of fear. What we were hearing on the media and from other leaders was around layoffs. And the question was, how do you even sell during that initial period in March? How do you cold call someone? Does anyone want to talk to you? Do you want to buy stuff? And what we saw in the data, having conversation intelligence, being able to capture and understand these interactions across so many different industries, 35 million sales calls in total, was that we had access to a completely different, uh, conversation that we were seeing the media talk about. And we wanted to set that data free so that people could make better decisions. And if we could save sales reps from being laid off, wow, we felt really good about what we were doing. And specifically, this is one of the old slides we showed back on April 3rd, uh, showing the end of March 23rd data, which shocked us. Was that the entire sales community had moved out of their offices and into their garages and living rooms and dining rooms and bedrooms, yet sales productivity didn't take a hit. And that's not the story that people were telling, and we wanted to make sure that we got that out there for everybody to, you know, engage and realize that yes, there were a lot of problems to be solved at that point. We went on and did 47 daily briefings. We interviewed CROs around the country asking them what they did and what changes they were making to adapt during this time. And I wanted to get thoughts from this group. So get your chat ready. Here we go. But this is what we did to answer the changes and to help other leaders make decisions and get through this time. I'd like to hear in the chat, as, 'cause I've heard it from 47 straight leaders, what are some of the things that other companies tested and did during this period that you had not done before? You were an experiment that you had to run to adapt to a very challenging time. And secondly, what stuck? What are you doing today? So I'm gonna do a very long awkward pause here, and I would love to see some of the thoughts from this group. We've got 77 active participants here. What were some of the experiments you ran in your company to help people through this time? And if you want to share, I'll call on you as well. So I'm just looking at the chat. We'll get a few of them in. I know folks are typing, but Nelson focusing on roadmap meetings. What else? John Stern, micro community stuck. Josh Wetzel, daily standups to bring the human element together, short 15 minutes. Hey, Josh, if you could just jump off of mute for a second. I'm curious whether that is stuck. Are you still doing that type of standup, or how has it evolved?

Jim, good to see you, by the way. Yes, but we've cut it way back. We did it 5 days a week. And what we did was we, we connected it. So every day of the week there was some touchpoint, but there are days where we had all-hands or other team meetings or pipeline calls. We cut out the standup because what we found was that people wanted to connect, right? You want to see your teammate, you want to, you want, you want that human compassion component that you've missed from going to the, you know, getting coffee in the morning or having lunch together. But we didn't want to overdo it, right? People already have enough Zoom meetings on their calendars and they're doing enough. So But we've kept it and we do it at different levels of the organization, the leadership team. I do it with all of my teams, the marketing group, the sales group.

Nice. And whatnot.

So.

Love it, Josh. Good to see you, buddy.

Thanks.

Joshua, you mentioned you're using videos in the SDRs. Are those working? We've seen that play out there. How's that sticking? If you wouldn't mind.

Yeah.

So yeah, they're doing great. We actually now have our sort of field-facing reps do them as well before meetings, after meetings.

So we're seeing a tremendous uptick from the customer, just from an engagement perspective, both on a prospecting as well as just ongoing engagement.

And is open rate staying? You know, we're all getting a lot of these videos. Are you finding that even today people are still opening these?

Uh, yeah, we are.

Nice, nice. Love it. One more. John Stern, I don't see you, but I'd love to hear from you. Microcommunity stuck. Talk a little bit about what a microcommunity is.

Yeah. So basically around the time that COVID came around, a lot of events, you know, were canceled and people moved online to, you know, either sales and marketing communities, virtual events, things like that. And I joined a few of them. And as we decided to bring a product to market during COVID uh, these microcommunities have given me access to people and, um, quick feedback that I couldn't have gotten other ways. It would have taken, you know, much longer. I see actually, you know, Jeremy Kemper in here. I met him in one of them. So I've, I've expanded my network so greatly during this time and it's really accelerated, you know, user feedback, bringing product to market, things like that by being able to have these relationships that you can build that, you know, if you're going to events, there's so much time and travel and all this, and you've had the ability now to have access to more people quickly than you ever could before.

I love it. I love the human connection, man. We're all really in need of that. One last comment for me is that I just think we are seeing some of the best selling we've seen in a decade. I mean, you think about the authenticity that our sales teams are bringing, the empathy. We're seeing the demos start 2 minutes later today than they did before COVID because we are talking more to our customers and getting to know them. And this is what matters. So what I wanted to jump into today was share with you a specific deeper dive on the C-suite involvement that we've seen and make sure that we're all deeply thinking about this because the worlds have changed and in this current environment, we need to be ready for this. So we looked specifically at 500,000 meetings across 10 different industries. And what we noticed in this early period is that there's an 86% increase in C-suites joining the meetings. And we know that we're in these calls, we're in the calendar invites. We know specifically that we're seeing a massive increase in C-suite joining. So real quick in the chat, you know, I'm curious if you gave a percentage, just give a quick number, percentage up that you've seen in terms of C-suite higher in your calls. What do you see? Is it, you know, 30% higher, 10% higher, flat, down? What do you see out there? Let me just get a quick pulse from this group. So are you finding that your buyers, your prospects, are bringing the C-suite involved far more often. So flat, same level, 75% yes, about 30% while you're putting that in. It's interesting, one huge observation from the data is although the overall productivity stayed even, it was not by segment. Certain segments were highly impacted, down down 30 to 35, 40%, whereas other segments, the collaboration, the security, the infrastructure were up 20 to 30%. And so when you mix them together, it looked flat, but it's interesting here that you'll see different aspects here. So one comment before we jump in, I wanna get a sense from the group, As we think about how we help our teams get ready for this. So we are seeing a lot more CX involved in these deals, CXOs involved in these deals. I wanted to get a pulse from you. What have you done differently? What's something, as you know that you're seeing C-level execs involved, how have you armed your team? What's different about what you do today than you might've been doing a few months back or pre the period that we're in, the work from home period that we're in. Anyone want to share a couple quick thoughts of things that you've done that have been effective that would be helpful to our fellow peers here? I'm going to wait. We get some good typing going right here. I can feel it. I can see it. So Kurt showed that we cared about COVID their health, etc. Empathy, man, we saw that and the data showed it. Massively. Kurt, is that old news?

Are you—

I mean, I mean, that was March, that was April. Good God, the whole world was falling down. Now we're in December, and I know it's very tricky times for all of us, but we were a little bit more hardened. Do you find that we're still doing this type of empathy, or has it evolved?

Yeah, I think it just continues. And it kind of builds as well. It's also with our team. So not just with our sales motions, but it's with our team as well, just continuing to ask and not trying to overdo it, but just show that we care in kind of like a, just a nice genuine way. And I think that's helped us with strategic conversations as kind of a foundation for strategic conversations that maybe wouldn't have. There's just more trust just all around the virtual table, if you will. Thanks.

Interesting. Awesome. Thank you. John, we trained our salespeople on industry sector domain knowledge for our core target sectors and produced a lot more thought leadership content. Makes a ton of sense. John, you want to just give a little more context on that?

Yeah, thanks, Jim. So yeah, I'm actually based in Ireland, so good evening all. Great to hear this discussion. But we were selling into Europe as well as the North American market, Jim. Ironically, our business, these sectors. We made a bet this year to focus on communication service providers and security as two core sectors, cyber, cybertech, and really narrowed in on how our platform aligns with their domain knowledge. People really value, you know, outside of the sort of thought leadership, people love to get a sense as how are they doing relative to their peers without giving away competitor trade secrets, but what's going on in my sector, how are other people coping. So we focused a lot on that relative content, built it into proof of value documents, and shared it with everybody.

Love it. Love it. John, thank you. It's consistent. Of the 47 interviews I had, what I consistently heard was new messaging, completely refreshed ABM accounts. Things had wildly changed in terms of who had budget and who didn't. And more coaching. We saw a 63% increase in leaders taking coaching actions with their team. And this is, you know, Chorus, we're a leader in conversation intelligence. So we can see when people are commenting and engaging on these Teams interactions, but we were impressed. We were seeing more coaching in a work-from-home environment than we saw beforehand. But let me just share in terms of the one other data point here on the 86% is that what we're finding is that execs need to be coming into these interactions with a running start. And so I just want to plant that seed for all of you. I feel like the old execs, we might've joined an in-person meeting, you show up and Yeah, you prep in the lobby with the reps. It's different today. And I found, I was on a call with a UK client just last month and solo joining as a C-level call matching this data, but I wanted to come in at the running start. I listened to the very first call, picked out the key objectives. I listened to the call where our team had talked to their CEO and heard their feedback. And then I quickly listened to the next steps from the most recent call. So when I came on in, I was able to solve a problem versus be a shiny face. And nobody wanted to talk to a C-level exec. What they wanted was someone that had the ability to really engage and solve problems. And so that's our takeaway. It's one of the areas that, you know, we're working on. One of the other data points I wanted to share with this group and get your thoughts on how you do this— the data shows if you can get the CXOs talking more, you win more deals. Simple as that. So when we can get our CXOs engaged 8.5% more engaged. This is what— when we win deals, this is what shows up. The CXOs are talking more. And I wanted to ask this group, what are some of the ways— we've got an incredible group here— what are some of the ways that you're getting execs to engage and open up and to be authentic with you in the current environment? I'd love to hear what are, what are your go-to plays when you know you're joining these calls to keep it real, to keep it interesting? Jessica, every call with the discovery questions. Love it. Give me an example of a discovery question that you're asking.

Um, yeah, we're, um, we ask questions about what trends they're seeing in their industry. What challenges are facing them, even if it's not necessarily even directly related to what we're selling. The goal is just to get them to start to talk because we're, we're really trying to build trust as much as we are understand who they are, what their concerns are, maybe get some tips and tricks about what's pissing them off so that we can try and address some of those challenges. It's just get them talking.

Love it. I love it. I love the trends piece. In terms of, let me see, I'm just looking at the other questions here. So Rohan, we talk about prepare ahead of time. We're all looking at different pieces. What are the 3 things you do to prepare ahead of time? Yeah, mostly go on LinkedIn and see what they're excited about. And I somehow figure out that, that's where their industry is headed. Is their leadership team prepared? That— these are the questions I would see and do some research. Love it. I appreciate you sharing. One of the other things that might surprise this group, um, you know, it's funny, I, I'll be on a key C-level call tomorrow that we, you know, part of the data, um, and already thinking about how to get them engaged and, uh, Jessica, we're using the trends question, but we all need to be ready to demo, oddly enough, is what the data shows. So we find that on these CXO calls, that on average they'll see 3 to about 5, 3 to 6 minutes of time in a slide deck, but more importantly, they'll see between 19 to 24 minutes of demo. So one of the key things here is that they're 42% more likely to see a demo than a deck. We all have our own styles. I'm just simply sharing what the data shows. But I know even for my call tomorrow, I'm gonna have a— if I need to be on a demo, I should be ready to land these points, or at least a single point for a few minutes with the CXO, if that helps to get them engaged in talking. Across the board, this is what we're finding for the different C-level execs, the different levels of talk time as they're now more involved in these deals. I'm curious, uh, you know, about who we're bringing into the deals on our side. So let me ask this group, are you On the selling side, are you getting pulled into more deals? Are you finding that you're— I think we see on average, depends on the month, about a 75% increase in the selling side, C-level execs involved. So of this group, are you finding that you're more engaged in the sales process? And if so, talk a little bit about, you know, the impact you see it having on these interactions. So give it a second. Are you more involved? Are you getting pulled into these deals more? I think the other question is, how are you choosing which ones? You know, we're all a click away on Zoom right now from being in any interaction. How do we choose the right one? So simple question on the chat is just, are you getting pulled in more? Uh, into calls? Do you find that you're on twice as many interactions than you were before this period? My chat stopped working. I think I'm frozen over here. I'm kidding. All right, maybe you're getting long-winded answers. I'm going to get paragraphs. Okay, good, we are getting paragraphs. Uh, yes, I'm much more involved in the sales cycle. Easier to join virtual meeting versus Flying around, trying to join mid-late stage deals. Love it. By the way, a lot more meetings after 4:00 PM. So if you're curious, we saw 100% increase in meetings after 4:00 PM during this period. Little bit of an increase before 9:00 AM, but I bet many of us are being pulled into the post-4:00 PM calls. Way more of everything. Not going anywhere, no vacations. Okay, so to that point, there's not much more to do than work. That resonates probably with many of us. And one of the data points that you'll find is that if you, you know, on the CEO side, if you're selling into SMB, get ready, you're gonna see a much higher likelihood, a 3x higher likelihood that you're gonna have a CEO on the calls than what you saw previously. So, you know, and if you're selling into mid-market enterprise, there's also more likelihood than previously that you're gonna have CEO involvement. And what we're finding here is just with the focus on budgets, this concept of extreme ROI, 92% increase in CFOs joining calls. So leaders are getting closer to the action in these deals. If anyone has any quick comments on CEOs coming into calls and the impact that has, whether it's helpful or not, happy to hear those stories. But while you think about that, The final stat I wanted to share was that overall, this does matter. We talk about the data showing that the C-suite's more involved. Getting them involved leads to a 38% increase in win rate. So if they're not involved, your likelihood of winning is lower. And this is a big deal. We know they're getting more involved. It's improving our win rates. They're a click away. And, you know, maybe the one last thing to leave you with on the data side is if you're not getting more involved You maybe should be because your competition is, they are showing up on these calls. That's what the data says. You know, they are 75% more likely to be involved than they were before. And so think about that. Think about, you know, what, what, uh, your engagement is with this group and how it's changing your role. One other question. Do you anticipate these trends will remain even after travel picks up and things open up a bit more?

Yeah.

So I'd love the group's thoughts on this. I mean, this is the big question for everyone is what happens in AVC, after vaccine. And it's a dog-eat-dog world. So I do expect the competition will rise up, but overall my expectation is that it's gonna be a very slow transition. You're still gonna see a lot of people embracing the world that we're in right now and using the virtual meetings much more than they did previously. And the in-person will be far more experiential, far less flying out to show up the slide deck, and far more to do an interactive experience to build trust and relationships with people. Josh, I'm very curious on this. When will companies be comfortable hosting third-party employees for meetings? Josh, what's your take, or anybody else's on this?

I don't know. I'm an in-person type, so I like it.

I traveled a lot before.

But I think it's— I'm just, yeah, biggest curious— I'm curious is like, when will companies— like, it's particularly like Fortune 1000 where they're going to be driven by the attorneys making decisions on like when people can host people. My guess is it's probably wiped out for '21. There's very few in-person meetings. You can still do meetings where you have like a lunch with somebody or something offsite.

But yep.

And I saw recently, I forget where it was, I'll try to find it and post it here, but I I saw a prediction from some reputable source that predicted business travel would be down 30% when you look at last year compared to 10 years from now. So they predicted basically this will fundamentally change business travel. There'll be less of it, which makes sense generally because we're all getting comfortable now with these, like, you know, I mean, I don't know how many people here did a ton of Zoom meetings for external meetings pre-COVID. We as a company had used Zoom, but it was pretty much mostly internal. And you do a little bit here or there, but generally you're doing meetings like in person and whatnot. And now, you know, we're doing 5 to 10+ Zoom meetings a day. So you kind of live on it. Everyone's getting comfortable. And so, anyhow, I don't know.

I'm with you. And by the way, we're back into non-screen share. So everyone, take a minute, get out of the Slack, join, turn on that video. Let's have some fun since we're all stuck at home right now. Love the smile, John. Thank you. You know, the one story, Josh, that I heard, I was talking to somebody who said they're about to jump on a Zoom, and this is right when the world was opening back up in kind of late May. And the other person said, there is no Zoom link. I'm in the CEO's office right now. Where are you? And this person was sort of competing with this other vendor that they had brought in. And that was that moment where you realize that, boy, once someone's in the CEO's office and you're on a Zoom in your bedroom, And when the world opens up, we might— you know, things are going to be different. It's going to be really dependent upon how buyers like to meet people, in my opinion, because if they're willing to have certain vendors there, it's going to be tough to compete against that. Doesn't mean we get right back to where we were, but that story sort of struck me.

I, I have a question related to this. So our customers are large healthcare institutions. So think big insurance providers, big insurance payers. Um, having worked at one previously, I can say, um, without any hesitation, they're lazy. So my gut tells me when they have the ability to go back to meet in person, it's going to be really, really difficult to get in to see them because they know now this is an option and they can easily, you know, get on a call with the video off and say they did it and not engage. What tactics or strategies is anyone employing now to give people a really good reason to meet you in person, or are you thinking about that yet? Is that— obviously we're not there yet, but I'm trying now to think about in 6 months, in 9 months, what is it, what are the words I need to be able to use so they say yes, fly out, come see me, I want to see you face to face. Yeah, that's pretty much the problem I'm having too.

And Jessica, you know, my take on that is it's gonna be risky when we fly out to places because no one's gonna be in the home office. I mean, most likely their teams aren't all coming together, so you're gonna fly somewhere and have people remote. My two cents is once the world opens up, we're gonna be hungry to be at conferences and, you know, fun places again. And, you know, maybe I'm wrong, but this is my take, and you could have any conference and most of us want to get out of our house. We'll find any excuse in the world to take a few days away from our families that we love, but have been with a lot. And so it might be more experiential. That's— and we're seeing it even virtually, you know, doing the wine tastings and different events and sending gifts to people. They're engaging. They're showing up differently than just another webinar. Any other thoughts on Jessica's question? I know we're coming up to the end of the time here. Caitlin, I see you back on here. How are we doing?

No, you guys are doing great. I appreciate it, bringing it back in and seeing all these faces, especially late in the day and even later for people in Ireland. We were all just messaging each other. We had someone in the Netherlands on another roundtable, so you guys are really bringing it in late, so I appreciate it. And Jim, I appreciate you taking the time here. This has been tremendous, um, and I really appreciate it, rolling with it and doing everything you guys did.

Awesome. Thanks for the interactivity, everybody.

Hope you guys have a great one, and I hope we see you tomorrow on some more sessions. And let us know if you have any questions. Thank you for everything. Thank you. Thank you, Forrest.

Thanks, everybody.

Thank you.

Have a good one.