Dustin Deno, North American Sales leader at Showpad, argues that volume-driven sales is dying. Top reps now need creativity, business acumen, and grit. Spend a few hours weekly learning how prospects make money, then craft personalized pitches and A/B test your approach.
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another sales assembly study break. I am Christina Brady, president of sales Assembly. Want to give a shout out to Vidyard, our sponsor, and I'm here today with Dustin. Dustin, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Thank you. Dustin Deno here. I run North American sales for Showpad, responsible for AES, BDRs, solutions, engineering across, really enterprise all the way down through SMB for Showpack.
Wonderful. And so given that you're around reps and revenue producers so often, I imagine you have a lot of really good tips for them. So what's front of mind for you right now? And a really juicy tip that you would love to get at to help some of those frontline revenue producers.
Yeah, it's obviously an interesting time being in sales and I think we've seen these three characteristics or skills or attributes bubble up as successful for us. And I think it's important for every rep to know where to focus. And I think for me there's just been this shift towards creativity and business acumen being two elements that a rep needs to be successful, kind of rooted or grounded in this grit that I think most salespeople already have. And so I think that the tip that I would like to focus on is those two things are really hard to find in one person. Where you look at business acumen and creativity, it's so hard to get in front of someone today. That kind of activity isn't the only metric that you should look at from an input perspective. And so how are you getting creative? And there's lots of information and content about how to get in front of someone in a relevant way through, through kind of enhanced personalization. But the reps that I'm seeing that are tremendously successful today are very, very creative in how they do that. It's much more about quality over quantity now, and it's crazy how fast that has shifted. I think Covid has exacerbated that. So when you approach your day, don't look at as how many calls you're going to make. It's how well you're going to prepare for those conversations that I think is super important. The second thing is I would take a couple hours a week and I would just familiarize yourself with how a business makes money. Do you know how to read a balance sheet? Do you know how a company operates and how they generate cash for their business and for all their employees? There's this. The. It's a tough combination to have because you have to be creative to get in front of an executive, then you have to really lean in strong with kind of those value propositions and the value points that your business will or your. Your solution will help them solve. And I think those are two things that we're seeing. The reps that have those two things are overperforming so they can get creative and then, you know, articulate a value proposition that makes sense. So, yeah, that would be my tip, is to focus on those two areas.
Yeah, diving in a little bit deeper to, I think, something you honed in on that a lot of sales reps struggle with, especially at the beginning with this idea of I have this number of calls that I need to make in order to be successful and fill my pipeline, but prepping the way that I would want to prep, I don't have time to prep before every single one of these calls. And then there's this feeling is if I prep for this call and I do all of this research, and then they don't answer the phone and I never get them. Now I feel like I've wasted at that time. So I guess the first part is, do you feel like there is value in prepping for any call, even if they never answer? And how do you suggest that reps balance that I have all these calls and prep takes me forever?
Yeah, it's. I think what I would do is I would look at it and kind of ab test it for a week. Right. Like, and how much I don't know the answer. A lot of that depends on your solution and what product you're selling and who you're selling it to on how much you need to do. But I find it very hard to believe that if more research and kind of being more relevant and personalized to that person or that business is a bad thing. I just think the fundamental equation of more activity equals more revenue is broken and it's going to continue to break. And so therefore, it's up to you, I think, to look at your kind of funnel when we talk about activity through to if you're a BDR to pipeline creation, or if you're an AE to pipeline creation to revenue, you know, look at that. But I would, I would start mixing in some testing there. And it, like, people are always like. And I also think this culture of micromanaging activity is going to start to go away as well. And so if you go to your, to your manager with a business case and how you want to test it, I'm sure they'd be open to it. But that's the way I think about it, it's like kind of ab test. Okay, here's some. Here's how I'm going to approach it today. And here's maybe go back to your old way the next day and see kind of where it lands and do that for a couple weeks and see how things shake out. My gut is, is that if you're more relevant, you'll see better results with less effort, which seems to me like a smart thing to do.
It's definitely a smart thing to do, especially right now. And. And I think what you honed in on is good advice for revenue orgs as a whole, all the way up to leadership, which is this ultimately comes down to the way in which you're enabling your sales reps and how you're enabling them and the value that you're putting in who you're calling and why you're calling them and just being more deliberate with it. And so I think you're right. The old sales focus is just drop a lot of hooks. Drop a lot of hooks. Drop a lot of hooks. And, like, you'll catch a fish that way, like one or two fish. But we're not doing this to catch one or two fish. We're doing it to catch the right fish in the right way. So thank you for this wildly helpful, awesome.
Thank you. Excited to be a part of the sales assembly community and love what you guys are doing.
Well, we love having you, Dustin. Thank you and thanks again to Vidyard, our sponsor, once again, Christina Brady with sales assembly, and we will see you next week.
