10/20/20 - Sales Assembly Study Break featuring Jenny Floros

All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another sales assembly study break. I am Christina Brady, president of Sales Assembly. Want to give a quick shout out and thank you to Vidyard, our sponsor for these sessions. I'm here with Jenny Floros today. So, Jenny, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Hello, Christina. Thank you for having me. So again, my name is Jenny Floros. I'm the regional vice president of sales for Groupon. I oversee our merchant development team and our merchant support team. What does that mean? Merchant development is responsible for all of our existing merchants. So we focus on retention and growth. And then our merchant support team is our merchant success team, if you will, who handles a lot of our inquiries from our merchants.

Wonderful. As an old group owner myself, it's wonderful to see you again and work with you in this capacity. It's been almost a decade that we've known each other now, and I'm so honored to have you here. And the thing that we are talking about today, as I'm listening to my 2 year old in the room next to me build towers and knock them down and scream, is the idea of resilience. The idea of whether I'm a frontline sales rep or working in customer support or I'm a leader or a director or a CEO. Right now is a time when we need to be resilient and make things the new normal and get through things that we never thought that we would have to. And so what are your thoughts on resilience and what it means in today's day and age?

You know, I absolutely love that word. And as I was thinking through our conversation today and just thinking through the last several months of what we've all been through, that is the word that just continues to be top of mind for me. And the reason it is is because I am incredibly impressed by with my organization's resilience during this time, starting from our CEO Aaron Cooper, to everyone from the S team and our regional leaders, to our divisional sales managers, to our reps. Unfortunately, we have to furlough quite a few people, as most organizations did during this period of time. So the employees that we've retained throughout the organization really had a heavy lift. They not only had to manage a bit of the guilt of surviving and still being part of the organization while they saw their friends and colleagues have to be furloughed, but then they had to step up and really be able to figure out how are we going to manage our merchant relationships, how are we going to be effective in conversation with them and really take a completely different approach as to what the needs of our merchants are during this time. Very different conversations. So really having to be really creative, our sales teams, our sales managers have been very creative with putting together campaigns and deals that make sense for the merchants business in today's day and age. So from a merchant perspective, I would say, you know, my sales team has been extremely resilient in having to pivot conversations and customize those conversations to the needs of today, as well as, I think being very resilient in this, from my managers to myself to everyone involved and how we're managing this work from home. Virtual environments, how do you maintain the culture? And we talked a little bit about that a few weeks ago. How do you maintain the culture? How do you keep inspiring?

One of the biggest concerns was, you

know, in sales, you know, especially at Groupon, being in that environment, being on that sales floor, the energy, the excitement, the collaboration, the celebration of success, you know, that was pretty powerful in the office. So how do we replicate that online? How do we replicate that in a virtual environment? So again, I think we've done a good job. I think we have to continue to be really mindful and focusing on that collaboration, transparency, and being really creative doing. Some of our reps are taking leadership roles and stepping up and doing what we call our mini sessions where they're talking to all of their colleagues and their best practices of work from home and how to keep that pipeline flowing during this day and age. And it's been extremely, extremely impressive.

What's so impressive about not only that, but just I think Groupon in general is, you know, in 2007, 2008, Groupon was born of the last recession. And it was a way for not only people to become employed in a time when nobody was hiring, but also small businesses to be able to thrive when no one else were. And I've thought a lot about all of you right now in this other one, where it's almost the same types of problems, but in a very different way. And I think listening to you talk about the way that you, you and your team and your company are navigating this is just by caring about people and being resilient and finding a way to lean in and every single person taking in ownership of just making it until tomorrow. Resilience isn't always how do we get to the end of the year and hit our target. Sometimes resilience is just, I need to make it until tomorrow, I need to be okay until tomorrow. And then when Tomorrow comes, I'm going to find the resilience to make it to the next day. And if I can help somebody else do that, then all the better. You talked a little bit about individual contributors and reps almost taking on this leadership type of role in terms of how they're helping their peers. Have you seen sales reps taking on a leadership advisory role even with their merchants and their clients and helping them be resilient?

Absolutely. I mean, you know, part of sales process, which we talk about all the time is, you know, 70% of it is listening. Right. Listening to the merchant, listening to the pain points. I can't tell you how important that part of the sales process is during this period of time. More than ever, I think listening and understanding the pain points and really going through an effective needs assessment that's customized for today's environment is critical. Nine times out of 10, merchants just want to vent a little bit because they can't believe the position that they are in. And more than ever, my team has really had to step up and be advisors and guide and be consultative in a way that has been redefined. So that's where the creativity comes in. That's where our expertise, like you said, our foundation was built from a recession. So really being able to lean in to that and leverage that and think back to, you know, that time, that period of time, and how we were able to be assets and a valuable partner to our merchants. It helps that we have a lot of veterans still within the organization that knew that time period. But it is extremely, extremely important. And, you know, one of our mantras right now is that things don't get easier, we just get stronger. And that's, you know, again, in the spirit of resilience, that's how we're surviving right now. You know, things are going to continue to get difficult, but we're going to get stronger from it. And we're going to do everything in our power to be those, to be the person, partner we've been over the last 12 years to our merchants to help them get through this period of time. You know, unfortunately, there's a lot of businesses that are not going to recover from this. But as we all know, there's going to be a lot of new businesses that will, you know, be created and flourish during this period of time. So it's just finding the balance of both and being there for everyone.

Yeah, they can knock us down, but they can't knock us out. Right. That's resilience. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. And for the honesty and just for some, some tactical tips on ways that we can be resilient to help ourselves and our peers and our clients and our merchants. So, Jenny, thank you so much for being here. Once again, thank you to Vidyard for sponsoring our study break. And we will see you again next, next week for another one. Bye, everyone.