Steve Baumgartner, Head of North American Sales at InRiver, explains how to tailor your pitch by company size. Tell mid-market buyers a broad ROI story since they influence across functions. Tell enterprise buyers a narrow, process-focused story because their influence is limited to their role.
Hello everyone and welcome to another sales assembly study break powered by Vidyard. I am here with Steven. Steven, please tell us who you are and what you do.
Sure. No thanks. I appreciate you having me. Steven Baumgartner, career enterprise sales and marketing leader here in Chicago. I have spent half my career in consulting and the other half in various leadership positions with both both BC and PE backed companies. So I'm excited to be here. Currently I am the head of North American sales for a company called In River. We are the number one product information management platform, or what they call a PIM in the world with major operations in Europe and the US and our platform is basically designed to help both industrial and branded manufacturers and retailers manage all of their product information from one central point. So making sure that the right information is shared all the way from the warehouse to distributors, wholesalers, customers and specifically to make sure accuracy on all the e commerce sites. So excited about the opportunity we've got and pleased to be here.
Yeah, I am very pleased that you're here as well and excited to hear some tactical tips from you. So thinking large scale, as you're thinking about either frontline producers or members of any revenue org, what is one really tactical tip that comes to mind for you that is important and that you want to share right now?
Yeah, well I appreciate that. I don't know how tactical it is. It might be a little more philosophical frankly, but you've had great tips from other leaders on lead gen and prospecting and measurement. So I'm going to help with some philosophical guidance on messaging when trying to get opportunities through the funnel. When designing messaging for a consultative selling process, especially when addressing mid level contacts where we often start, we always start with those mid level contacts. Think about the characteristics of what it's like to actually work in different size organizations. So consultative enterprise sales is complex, people know that and usually involves a lot of different stakeholders within the organization and you need a lot of help in getting your deal done. But their ability to help you through that process and the influence they have will depend on the size of the company. So the simple rule of thumb is basically make your story of value larger for mid market organizations and make your story of value smaller for very large organizations. Does that make sense? And I'll explain why.
Yeah, I kind of, I'm attracted to anything that is sort of like inverse psychology like that and so I would love to have you dive one level deeper.
Yeah, so again make the story larger for mid market and smaller for enterprise. And the reason why is because for mid market, the organization is smaller. So your contacts have greater exposure to other functions and are usually privy to broader conversations within the organization. So tell a broader ROI story and speak to the benefits for the overall company and for your contacts, frankly, it'll give them greater exposure and make them look good when they bring a broader solution. For the enterprise, the company is larger and your contacts are going to have less exposure to other functions and have less influence over the overall strategy. Hence align your messaging to highlight more precise process improvements and then how it's going to make their jobs easier for both individuals and or related functions. Now naturally, if you know if you're doing your job as a seller, you'll eventually network your way to various executive teams like you should and they're going to need, they're going to, they will need to hear a balance of both of those stories. But frankly, when you're just starting out and you want to get the attention of the mid level people is where we often start and those are the people who are doing the work, then you got to kind of keep these two approaches in mind.
Well, that is fantastic. I honestly have never heard that before and it certainly got my wheels moving. And so I imagine you may have a couple people who reach out to you after this to want you to even dive a level deeper just around like how do I start, how do I tweak what I currently have and how do I sort of reframe my mind to work within this type of methodology? So sure.
And I'm happy to beat it up. It really just comes down to you have to think about what it takes for those individuals to accomplish things within their organization based on the size.
Yeah, that makes sense. And it's simplistic but also really, really strategic. So see that wound up being really tactical, I suppose. Good. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Once again, I am Christina Brady, president of Sales Assembly. Thank you to Vidyard and, and thank you to Stephen for being here today and dropping some amazing tips. We will see you all next week.
Thanks Christina.
