8/5/20 - Sales Assembly's Study Break Featuring Maria Tribble

All right. Hello everybody and welcome back to another study break with Sales Assembly. I am Christina Brady, the president here at Sales assembly and I want to give a quick shout out to Vidyard, our sponsor for sponsoring the content today. I am here with Mariah, who has some amazing knowledge to drop. Gonna give you a quick minute to just talk about who you are and what do you do. So over to you, Mariah.

Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me, Christina. So my name is Mariah Tribble. I am the VP of Enterprise Sales here at pathfactory, also a hobby flower farmer, but that's for another discussion. Path Factory. We have an intelligent content experience platform and virtual events offering that really allows marketers to accelerate, nurture and improve win rates and understand content performance and all that fun stuff really with the purpose of removing friction from the customer and prospect education process. So something that's super, super important right

now in the digital world, incredibly relevant. And I think a lot of people, even if they're not in that space, can take a page from it. And something really front of mind for a lot of people in businesses right now is this concept of planning, putting together a plan and how you do that and move forward. So in your own words, how do you navigate that right now?

Yeah, I mean, I think in terms of tactical advice for sales leaders, for individual contributors, for us, it's all about getting back to the basics. And really here in the last six months, it's really been about the mutual action plan. So there's a big difference though. Mutual action plans have been around for a really long time, but what we're doing is making them customer centric. So it's not written like a forecasting list. It's not all about filling in medic or bant. It's really about creating that customer centric plan, project plan that focuses on what happens at the end, what happens after the ink is dry. Love that.

And when you think about if I'm a company and I say, okay, yes, we need to put together a plan that can seem like a really big undertaking. And especially right now, while the world looks different, people don't know where to start. So creating a plan, what would step one look like?

Yeah, great question. I mean, in enterprise sales, which is where I sit, onboarding a new vendor is often really heavy lift. It's frustrating. It's a lot that the buyer has to gain consensus on with seven plus people. Build that business case, justify the budget. That's all what your buyer is working on. And a salesperson and a sales leader, you need to understand that without it interrogating them with a medic checklist. Right. You need to really listen to what is the value that they are looking to your product for and you really need to agree on that impact. So that's really the first step. Identify together why do they want your offering? What is your offering going to do for them and then really paint that picture for them. Not just who owns the budget, who else can say no? Who, who has the authority to sign all of those things but filling it out as a project plan. Here are the things that I believe need to happen. Is this accurate and making it really a tracker for the two of you that becomes your tool that you use on your weekly calls and it really gives that, I guess just co authored checklist and so everyone knows who's responsible for what. And then it really gives you insurance. Right, as the salesperson. So that if that champion leaves, you don't have all of that knowledge leaving with them. You can show up to the other people you've met and say, here is what Christina and I have already done together. We've checked these boxes. These people from your team have been involved. This is the impact we were driving towards. And I mean there's so many other things that it helps with. But really painting what happens after the signature is the most important part.

I love that what you're talking about is a meaningful and deliberate change in the sales process that can help not only the person in seat now, but make sure that you have consistency as a business and how you're approaching your prospects and your clients going forward. So that's wonderful advice. Thank you so much for taking a quick study break with us. Thank you again to Vidyard. Once again, I'm Christina Brady with Sales Assembly. We were here for another study break and we will see you next week for yet another. Mariah, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.