Sales Assembly's #ScaleSmarter Virtual Roadshow - San Francisco 6.25.20

5 of 7 that sales assembly is doing this week on our virtual roadshow. Having already knocked off Boston, Seattle, New York City and Los Angeles so far this week, with still Denver and Austin yet to go tomorrow. And for those that aren't familiar with Sales assembly, the quick spiel is we are a Chicago based company started three years ago and we really set out to build the first all in one platform and membership model for fast growing B2B tech companies on the revenue side of their business. So how it works is companies join Sales assembly as a member. And we have some really great organizations that are a part of Sales assembly, some that are represented on the panel today like G2 and Gong and Upwork and Glassdoor and great companies like that. And they join Sales assembly and then they get access to a whole bunch of really great stuff.

All.

All focused on the types of things that revenue leaders are in need of as they continue to scale. So from learning and development for their teams to support around customer success, to certifications for their sales enablement and account executives to help with revenue operations, to peer communities for literally every Persona within the organization, help finding talent for all the open positions, the list goes on and on. And today we're fortunate to have close to 140 of the best B2B tech companies around the country that are members. And we decided to plan this series of events simply because of everything that's been happening throughout the world. And as that then translates into the business sector and being that we work exclusively with B2B tech companies on a daily basis, you know, a lot of the same conversations were coming up around, okay, really, really quickly, times are now very different. You know, no longer are we in a scenario where cash is flowing really, really nicely and we're able to go out and raise bunches of money at ease and we're able to just be hiring for the foreseeable future and all these great things. Companies were really in a position as of March where things are slowing down and we're looking to get more strategic. Strategic around hiring, strategic around the types of strategy that's being rolled out, the types of technology that's being incorporated, go to market strategies, messaging, how we're managing from a leadership standpoint, being that all of our employees are back at home. And we thought it would be fun to plan a series of events that were focused around the theme of scaling but scaling smarter. So not scaling for the sake of growth, but scaling in a way where we're putting the foundational elements in place today to put our organizations in A good position to continue to grow at a nice rate, but also setting ourselves up for long term success and scalability. And that's kind of the theme of all of these events. And the reason why we're doing it in a geographic format is to infuse some flavor from the local tech ecosystem. So the theme of today's event being around San Francisco is there's going to be two parts to the program. The first is going to be a panel discussion which I'm really, really excited for. That we're going to kick off here in a moment, then we're going to have some live Q and A available. And after the panel and questions, we're going to bring in a friend and colleague, Todd Capone, who's going to be giving a 30 minute keynote presentation, then followed by some Q and A after that. So it's going to be a jam packed morning with some really great takeaways and thought leadership being shared. And with that I'm going to turn it over to Christina, who's our esteemed president at Sales Assembly. She's going to be moderating the panel this morning. I'll let her do a quick intro and then we'll kick it over to the panelists themselves and we'll be off and running. So with that, thank you for joining us and kick it over to Christina.

Awesome. Thank you, Jeff. I'm very lucky to be here with this incredible group of people. I'm pinching myself. But yeah, like Jeff said, I am the new president of Sales Assembly. A little bit about my past. I've been in sales for 14 years now, in the last 10 in tech, sales and in leadership. Most recently I was at Glassdoor leading the SMB growth org there. And how I came across Sales assembly is that we were partnered with them and I was able to see as a revenue leader myself, the immediate lift in the skill set and confidence and overall ROI of the team that I led, as well as others next to me. And so I knew the value as a revenue leader. And so when Covid offered me the opportunity to make a switch and find a new home, I decided I wanted to do what I loved and help other companies do the same. And that was grow, scale smarter, develop your people and find an easy and cost effective way to do that. And now even more so to do that in a virtual world where I imagine going forward, life is going to look like a hybrid of in person and virtual and we have to adapt. And so my job is to come on board and help us grow and Adapt in the new world. And like I said, I'm surrounded by incredible people today who can introduce themselves way better than I ever can. So just in the order that I see you, I'm going to go through and please just tell me who you are and a little bit about what you do. So Samantha, I'm going to kick it over to you first.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I'm Samantha distefano, Very excited to be here today. I have spent the last 15 years in human capital and the last three at Upwork where I lead our new customer acquisition as well as our growth teams on the enterprise sales side. Upwork is a two sided marketplace for anyone unfamiliar with it where we gain access or grant access to flexible talent to organizations all across the globe with a mission to provide economic opportunity. That's my dog. So that people have better. So super excited to be here today.

Hey, puppy.

Wonderful. Thank you. Samantha, Kate, over to you.

Morning everyone. I'm Kate Ollering. I'm the Chief Sales officer at Glassdoor, which is a ratings and review site for jobs and companies. I lead all of our customer facing go to market team. So sales, customer success and revenue operations for the company. Good to be with you. Very nice to see you, Christina. Good to see you too,

Amit. We'll take it over to you.

All right, thanks Christina.

Excuse me.

Amit Bem Dov, CEO and co founder of Gong IO We're 300 people company based in San Francisco with development in Israel, which is where I'm calling from right now. GONG is my fourth company and I'm happy to share from my experience.

Awesome. Well, we're happy to have you here for your experience as well. We're going to take some of it and absorb it today. So I appreciate you being here. And last but certainly not least, Goddard, please tell us about yourself.

So hi, I'm Godard Abel, co founder and CEO of G2 and like Amit, I've built a few companies and I've been an enterprise entrepreneur for 20 years building four companies. I think I learned the hard way. My first company being an entrepreneur is about sales. No sales, no company. And G2, we're really building the place where you go for software or we. I think Kate, we joked earlier, it's a bit like Glassdoor but for your customers. So customer use and ratings of software products.

Amazing. Thank you so much. To kick it off today and get started, I'm going to do a little bit of a softball, a little bit of an icebreaker. The theme of our roadshow is Scaling smart, how to grow, but do it in the right way. And I couldn't think of a better group of people to talk us through how to do that. So, Samantha, I'm going to come to you first. But when you think about scaling smart and what that means in your experience, what are one to two things that you would tell a company right away that they have to consider as they think about scaling and growing, especially in the world that we're in right now?

Yeah, absolutely. So over the last three years, upwork has scaled quite a bit. So we went from 20 sellers to 200 is what we have today. And lots of lessons in that. So the one I'll focus on today is don't over hire, but also don't wait until you're 100% ready to scale your sales team. And so I think the first things you need to look at is you need to make sure that you've nailed your product market fit and that you have confidence in your customer acquisition strategy as well as your customer retention strategy before you're ready to really scale. And so I would also be sure you're taking into account the drain on resources that scaling and hiring can have. And so we actually hired 75 people in just 60 days recently. And we definitely overlooked the drain on resources. And so those resources were one the drain on our direct managers. So they were spending the majority of their time interviewing versus running the business. We saw a drain, of course, on our recruiting team who was sourcing, screening and helping us hire those candidates. And then the biggest one we overlooked was the drain on our training and development team. And so we're really paying the price right now and driving to make sure that these new people we've hired are productive. And so if I were to do it again, I would say that we would, rather than hiring in one big cohort, we would even out that hiring plan to drive greater productivity and to decrease the drain we would feel in other areas of the business.

Yeah, I think so many of these things we don't realize the impact they're going to have until we're in a position where we're forced to do it. And I imagine that what you learned in terms of what resources you had to tap into and then overly tap into, that you're going to be smarter going forward for it now. You're going to know how to handle a situation like this. Even if it's the same amount of growth that you have to have, you're going to do it in a different way. And then obviously sharing the knowledge. Does anybody else have something they want to add in terms of tips that they would give to Scale Smart?

I think one regret I have at G2 is investing. I would invest in sales enablement earlier. And you know, we just hired a new CRO, Mike Weir, who was with LinkedIn, but I think now he's also realizing we really need to build a better sales enablement function. Because I think like Samantha said also over the past couple years, we did hire a lot of people. This year with COVID and everything, we've slowed down a bit, which is kind of good. And that we can finally get everyone trade. But I wish we just invested that much earlier.

Yeah. To go one level deeper there. I think what I'm hearing from a lot of companies throughout the roadshow is that enablement is a tricky piece. Everybody thinks of it a little bit differently. Everyone uses a little bit different tooling and resources and teams. So when you think about scaling into enablement a little bit earlier, go one level deeper. And what does that mean to you and your company?

I think for us at G2, our prime customer is the marketer. And I think it's really getting our salespeople understand our customer Persona more. And especially enterprise marketing is also very multifaceted as you have demand gen marketers, brand marketers, customer marketers, and really understanding the customer, understanding what a marketer's goals are and how to map our solutions into that. I think that's where we really want to invest. So they can really communicate the ROI and then also make sure we deliver on it.

Yeah, I think understanding our customer, it sort of brings me to my next topic. Amit, I'm going to come to you for this one. But how do you envision in person, meetings and travel evolving in the future as sales and revenue leaders? One of the things that we always say is I can sell someone the best when I get in front of them. And we rely on that in person, contact and communication. And it's been ripped away. Maybe not forever, but it's always going to be a little bit different. So how do you envision selling going forward and the human connection element of it?

I'm a little bit of an extremist on this. Like not everybody would agree, but I think like it's, it's gone, it's gonna be gone for a while, like a year or two. And if that's the case, it will linger like maybe forever. This is a real challenge for a lot of companies and they're struggling with how to maintain good contact, deliver A message interact with multiple people. You know, we experience a lot of things even at Gong for All Hands, especially these times, you know, there's always like a dilemma. Do I show a PowerPoint or do I want to make eye contact with me and the people or people looking at each other?

Right?

So what we're doing, and we're over 300 people right now, we're opening it up, Everybody's video on unmuted, looking at each other. Kind of like the Brady Bunch view and the way we communicate. If you want to show messages or slides, we just use them as a virtual background. You may have seen like a LinkedIn post, but you could play with it. You could export your PowerPoint to background so people can see me when I'm talking or one of the other team members and then show presentation.

So you need to get ready for

virtual because in person isn't coming anytime soon. Like, you know, when the restrictions are lifted. You know, I'm sure people would love to meet with their families, with their friends. Do they really want the salesperson showing up at the office or at home?

Right?

Or not everybody be there. So virtual is new. That's what it's going to be, right?

And Kate, same question to you. San Francisco specifically as a market is so heavy in innovation and companies that in person is just a huge part of it. You can go and you can knock out 10 or 15 companies in a week by just doing a quick office to office visit. So for you being on the ground there right now, how do you envision in person meetings in the way that we sell changing?

I agree with Amit. I think that it's gone for a while, if not forever. And I, you know, I have some, I have a little bit of sadness around that because we all love going and meeting with customers and having that experience with our teams and, you know, hopefully leaving with the win. It's just a great boost for morale and a great experience. So here's what I think. I think in general that buyers will have less tolerance for in person meetings, even when the world wakes up, because a virtual meeting is more efficient. You know, I went to any of the folks on the phone here and I said you could get what you need done from this vendor in 45 minutes over Zoom, or you can host them, have lunch and spend an hour and a half. I think I know the answer. As a seller, it's unfortunate because you'd love, you know, the opposite. You'd love to be able to go and spend the extra time and get the Relationship building. But I think we will evolve. You know, like I do think that in person events will come back at some point and those will be opportunities to do the more traditional relationship building and the schmoozing and that sort of thing. But if digital transformation wasn't already a huge trend, it's coming. I think more and more companies will focus on transforming their funnel from a sales LED funnel that requires in person meetings to providing more information to buyers digitally and through self service channels. And I think one of the outputs that you will see, my guess is that we'll get bigger and bigger deals done over zoom and over the phone in ways that, you know, we wouldn't have really imagined probably even three or four months ago. And this was like an emerging trend for the last couple years and this has just exploded it. So I think that's, you know, if you're thinking about where to invest, that's certainly what I would recommend.

Yeah. Even sticking there for a moment, do you feel like in San Francisco people are going to go back to an office or do you feel like at home is the way that it's going to be? Do we need to be making investments in large offices? What do you see as the future of work from home versus office life?

Yeah, I think it will depend on role in teams and personal preference. I've talked to a few folks that think that there's going to be this like, you know, mass exodus from the Bay Area because of the cost of living in the Bay Area. I think folks that want to work in tech and want to be in the heartbeat of tech, I think that will continue to be the barrier for the foreseeable future. However, I think what my personal opinion is, I think what we'll see is the emergence of extreme flexibility. And so no longer. This is just like Kate's view of the world. Maybe this is how I'd like the world to work, which is why it's my view. But you'll have like kind of hotel desks where you can come and when it makes sense for your team, for your group, for your employees to come and mingle and socialize and work together and collaborate, you'll have that space available. It will probably be smaller and cheaper than it was in the past. But then, you know, if your team members want to work from home, they probably will have the flexibility to do that in the future. Because if you don't give them that flexibility, some other company likely will. So I think that that will force us all into this posture of extreme flexibility.

Yeah, this is a hot topic. Anybody else have thoughts on the future of office versus work from home?

And I think, and this is Godar and I'm standing in front of our virtual Chicago office and we just built that out last year. And also we have a nice beautiful office in San Francisco. And so I think our offices are going to become more of a hotel type environment or maybe even more like a wework where and I think our vision is more you'll have a community space where people want to get together periodically for events, kickoff meetings, customer meetings, celebrations, and then that they probably will have, most of them will probably have less of a permanent desk, but they will have a place to set. And I think we're also thinking we did build out all this space. Likely we need all of it. How do we make it more of a tech community space? You know, bring in other companies, bring in events. And a great example also, I used to work at Salesforce, acquired my last company now, but they have the ohana floors now in the Salesforce tower. And I think Salesforce already in San Francisco is already going to hotels set up in the tower. And so I think that kind of, you know, flexible workspace is going to accelerate and we're probably all going to have less of a permanent desk and permanent spot in our company's office. I think it's up to us to really make our office more of a destination so that people will want to visit.

Yeah, I think it's going to be very interesting to see how bottom lines and ROIs and cost structures change. When we're not investing so much in the physical location. We then decide where do we invest these dollars and how do we invest them in a way to make sure that we are growing and doing it in the right way. One of the areas where I feel like people are going to start to dig in is just in their people equity and their human equity and the types of people and number of people that, you know, we're hiring. And so Samantha, thinking about hiring and bringing people on board, what do you see the future of talent acquisition looking like in the world that we're in right now where we can't bring someone to the office and shake their hand. How has this changed hiring for you? Are you hiring more people who are remote for your internal teams? What does it look like?

Yeah, so we in regards to remote, we've looked at the trends, we've seen over productivity during this time and we've identified that the more senior roles we will open up to be remote. But around our BDR function and our more early in their career sales members. We do value this idea of that hub and not just for the company and our own success, but also for those as individuals. And so we do see there being a lot of value in the collaboration. Being an office brings the learnings and the skill development and so we will go remote for more of our senior roles but we will still have a flexible but still in an office type presence for our BDR and our mid market sellers today around talent acquisition. I think the biggest shift I could say beyond the obvious, like we're obviously interviewing via zoom and it's a little different not to be meeting candidates face to face but for me as a hiring manager I've definitely put more emphasis on identifying self starters, self learners. Those are of course things I always looked for, but not to the degree. I'm looking for that today. And that is due to the fact that when you're starting at a new company and you're starting remotely, like we just have to be honest that no matter how much we try to shift that virtually, it is just different. You don't have those in office run ins, you don't have this knowledge transfer. It's just, it's a little bit different, it's more forced, it has to be planned. And so for me it's identifying who we bring on board. You know, are they going to be able and capable to drive themselves to learn the product, learn the culture, learn the selling motions with our help. But are they self motivated to do that?

Yeah, you make a good point. And I'm going to keep you on the point of culture for a moment because one of the ways that companies continue their culture is every person they hire on the first thing that we bring them into before anything else, even the product, is we're going to onboard you into our culture. And that's how companies who lead with really great sustainable culture do it. It's a lot harder now to hire people and scale culture and even change culture if you need to. Smart companies will see when they have a problem with their culture and they have to make a change. And it's very easy when everybody is together, but it's very hard when they're all separate. So thinking about that, how do you scale culture in addition to the hiring right now?

Yeah. So in my opinion culture is the sum of everyone's attitudes and so informed teams are productive teams and so one is communication. And so how are we communicating not just the what but also the why on a really consistent basis with our Team members. Obviously Zoom isn't always ideal. It's different. But that doesn't mean we should shy away from figuring out how to deliver the same type of experience or culture communication through that avenue. And so an example of how Upwork's doing that is we have a really heavy high recognition culture. And so we've figured out ways and how can we maintain that recognition via group meetings, via Zoom. But a big one we've just started talking about is we do an annual sales trip and this is obviously for our top performers. And it goes without saying this year we are most likely not going to be able to get on a plane and create that same experience for these top producers. But as a leadership team, we know that we are absolutely going to do something. It's just going to be different. And so we're right now in this process of brainstorming what are ways that we can deliver a really impactful, highly motivating experience, just in a much different way than we did last year.

Yeah, I love that. Right. Like the idea of a president's club, what do we do? Like, what does that look like? These are all the questions that people have. And Amit, coming down to you, when you think about scaling culture, or even for some of these really early onset companies who want to still develop their culture and build their missions, how do you do that right now when we all feel so separate?

Well, I think it's like Samantha said, culture is how you act. Right. It's not what you say. I mean, we took the time early on. I think we're like 70 people. And we knew gonna before COVID before everything. We took the time to codify our DNA. And your DNA doesn't mean what we

aspire to be like what we are.

Right.

You know, I want to be like beautiful, smart and tall and whatever.

It's not what I want.

But what we are and took the time and I think we're pretty successful, that that's definitely part of the onboarding. And I don't see it like changing like whether we're in the same office or not. It's like it goes beyond that, just kind of deeper value. For example, at gong, we have an operating principles called no sugar. Like we like the truth, like unsweetened, like it is.

Right.

It's not necessarily a good thing.

Right.

Some companies could be very successful choosing the opposite. Right. And I think everybody, how I act, how the leadership, every team member, the key is to communicate and keep in touch. It's very, very easy for people to get Lost, especially when you have like hundreds and thousands of people. When I speak and I do check ins with team members, like at random, like all every day. And one of my top questions, like, who are you speaking with on a daily basis? Like, who did you speak with this week? Right. If it's just my manager or another peer, that's not good. So we try to connect as many people as we can and to make sure people are connected. That's how you become viral isn't a good word these days, but that's how you spread the culture.

Yeah. I love when you say the idea of no sugar. What I hear is respectful honesty. I think a lot of people can misinterpret when you say, like, hey, just give it to me straight as being mean or cruel or aggressive. But a respectful honesty and almost a radical candor. Those who have heard of that, I think is a wonderful way to lead your culture where we trust each other because we're respectful and we're honest and that's how you show that you care. Good culture leads to happy employees who stay for a long time. Coming from Glassdoor and looking at our data, people don't stay at a company long term because of their pay. They stay because of their leaders, and they stay because of the culture. And that is meaningful even after people leave a company. For me, I'll always think of the companies that I've been at, one like Glassdoor, as a place that I can call home because I connected to the culture so deeply. So I love when you talk about how you identify it that way. And leaning into some of the Glassdoor data, Kate shared with me a little bit about some of the employee satisfaction data that she has at Glassdoor. And a lot of people right now are worried that their employees are unhappy or disconnected or feeling unmotivated. And Kate, some of the data that you shared with me showed a little bit of the opposite, at least specifically in San Francisco. It looks like the employee satisfaction, especially amongst revenue orgs, is the highest in San Francisco compared to other larger cities. So would you mind diving a little bit deeper into some of the, the juicy Glassdoor data on that?

Yeah, sure. And you're welcome to flash it if you, if you have it. But compared to the other, you know, out of the top five, of course San Francisco is one of the top five cities where salespeople exist. San Francisco continues to be the highest ranked in terms of overall satisfaction. I can't remember the others, Christina. It was like New York, Chicago, maybe Atlanta ones.

You would. But I'M looking at it and it's beautiful. If you all, if everybody wants to see what I'm looking at. Kate, do I to have permission to share?

Yeah, go ahead.

So reach out to christinaalesassembly.com and I'll send you over the Glassdoor data on it.

I think one of the fun things about Glassdoor data is you can then attempt to like explain it. It's a little bit lagging, right? You know, people come in and they rate their experience at that moment in time. And across salespeople, it does look like San Francisco has remained steady and has definitely kept its lead against the other cities. And who knows what this is about? Maybe this is, hey, now I have flexibility, I'm happier. Maybe my culture has persisted in my San Francisco based company. Maybe the compa benefits I'm receiving continue to outpace other cities. So like, we don't exactly know what the reason is, but we do know that generally speaking, according to Glassdoor Tech, sales folks in San Francisco are still happier as compared to their peers in other cities. Chicago's not too far behind from my memory.

No, it's not. And I can kind of go through some of the high level data here because I think it's so relevant. And I would also love to hear the other panelists kind of take on this. And Goddard, I'm going to start with you once I kind of go through this just to hear sort of your take on if this is what you perceive and see as well. But the primary contributors to overall satisfaction are, number one, culture and values. So it's no wonder that we're talking about that. And it keeps coming up. That is why people say a company's even when times are hard, senior leadership, career opportunities, business outlook, work, life balance, and I kid you not, at the very bottom of that is compensation and benefits. And it doesn't mean that it's not important, but it means these are the drivers to productivity, to happiness and to long term retention. This is what is going to drive your people and whether they're working remotely or in an office. These factors are not distinguishing between where I actually sit down. And so this is the bread and butter as you're building and scaling an org. These are the things to lean. And if you look specifically at San Francisco and gutter, this is where I'm going to come to you. They've almost consistently been at the top in terms of the trend of employee satisfaction in terms of these things. And do you feel like that's what you've witnessed in the Bay Area versus some of the other companies like Dallas or Chicago or even LA and New York.

I do think it really depends on the company. And at G2, we actually, we measure also ENPs internally, our employee satisfaction. And for us, it's been higher in Chicago than San Francisco. And I think also what I see in our ENPs internally across teams, I think it does depend a lot on the manager and the leader, obviously, ultimately me for the company. But we do see, I think the more the leader engages their team, aligns their career paths, reinforces our values, the higher it is. And so I think it does really depend on the company. And one other thing, also, being in the review business at G2, I do think it also depends by region because, for example, at G2, in Northern Europe and countries like Germany, where I'm originally from, people are much more skeptical. Or in Japan, we see this. In Japan, the average rating of a product is about 3.1. And I was also in Tokyo. We have a partnership with SoftBank. They said people in Tokyo, when they go to a restaurant, like three is actually good, whereas in the US anything below four is pretty terrible. And I think that may also be San Francisco, frankly, anything else has the greatest hype culture. So part of my theory might be that people in San Francisco, if something's pretty good, that's like 4.5 cities, like Chicago's more Midwestern. In Chicago, if it's pretty good, it's four, I think. I mean, I don't know, maybe also see us in Israel. Right. We're just different cultures. People rate things differently.

Yeah, that's a good point. I didn't think about it, just the cultural differences.

Yeah.

Yeah. How do you feel like those cultural differences in terms of employee satisfaction and employer culture, what do you think some of those differences are?

Well, I think, you know, and I think, like I said, Chicago, San Francisco, our main two sales offices. I do think some of the stereotypes like Chicago a little bit more Midwestern.

Right.

And I think people do tend to be a little bit more loyal, which makes it a bit easier to retain talent. And I think the strength of San Francisco is always, I think there's all the innovation, all the hype, and people are very eager, very ambitious. But I think they're also much more likely a year or two in, hey, I've vested some options. Let me go to the next thing. And so I think that is always an additional chance in San Francisco, being there's so much innovation. Right. I think you have to stay shiny. Also, as a recruiter, as an employer, and I think that's. You have to put a little bit more effort into that.

Yeah, you touched on something, too. And, Samantha, I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Motivation and happiness sometimes are mutually exclusive. And we've talked a lot about employee fulfillment and culture and happiness, but sometimes that doesn't equal motivation to get out of bed and do the hard work to do your job. And especially right now, there's a lot of external factors that are impacting our frontline's ability to continue to be revenue producers. So for you right now, what types of things are you doing to motivate that frontline to keep working and feel positive and see the light at the end of the tunnel?

I'll go back to the communication piece. I think being really clear and direct and transparent to a degree around what needs to happen and the why behind it has been working to drive that motivation. I'd also say, like, adding a human layer to it is very much my personal style in leading. And so there are a lot of things going on in the world right now beyond Covid. And I think, for me, it's really important that I'm not shying away from talking about them, not shying away from being an outlet for my teams to talk about it with me, because I realize that it affects how they show up to work every single day. And so I also think building that trust beyond, like, how can I help you be the most productive you can be? How can I help you feel motivated and get motivated to accomplish our goals has definitely been an approach I've been leaning pretty heavily into over the last three months.

I think it's a really important point that you brought up right now. Not only do we have this global pandemic that is raising a lot of questions, but we are dealing with not a new, but a very public, due to technology, outpouring of racial injustice and lack of equality. And a lot of companies are feeling like they have to, one, decide how they want to show up and who they want to be, and then two, how do we talk to our people about that and make it a part of our culture? I think there's two big struggles with that. One, companies, to your point, being brave enough to take a stance, and two, enabling their people and their leaders to be able to know how to talk about it and do that in a delicate way. So for you, mentioning Samantha, that you have these conversations and you're open to it, what is some advice that you have for maybe some other young leaders or young companies on how to have these conversations and be open about it.

Well, we're fortunate. We have a fantastic DIBS leader, Erin Thomas, who started with Upwork, I believe, about a year ago. And so she's been a wonderful resource for our leadership team on just how to lead through this. But for companies or people that don't have access to a DIBS representative at your firm, there is so much information out there already. I know specifically to Aaron Thomas, who's with upwork. Her and our CEO, Hayden Brown, have published quite a few articles on how to manage and how to address this in your company. And so if you just go to LinkedIn, you can find those resources, but they don't consider that work that we're doing proprietary. And so I love that that they're sharing it with the greater audience. So other companies who may not have the same amount of resources could use that and leverage it. And the last piece, I would say, is just to educate yourselves on what is going on and how to approach these types of difficult conversations. There's a ton of information on the web about it, and I think just taking the time and doing some research has been really helpful.

Yeah. Thank you so much. And Kate, at Glassdoor, with one of the core values there being transparency, I know that you and a lot of leaders are sort of leading the forefront on how you lead a transparent workplace even when there are tough issues at hand. What advice would you have for other companies, leaders, or peers to navigate these topics right now?

I would say, in general, we're all playing the long game right now, whether it's with our employees or with our customers. We are trying to lead with empathy. And I personally believe that if you lead with empathy and your people feel like they're being heard and taken care of, that they will do great things for you. So, like, that's generally my philosophy on this stuff, where if they know you, if they trust you, if you share the right information with them, you might not always say the right stuff on this. You might not always be comfortable talking about topics that might be new for you. And, you know, something like racial injustice is incredibly challenging to talk about if you're not used to talking about it. But I think most people, if you have met them with, you know, like, with this blanket of empathy over all of these things, they'll give you the benefit of the doubt. So I would just encourage you to be courageous. Go, you know, say what you feel and learn. And, you know, sometimes someone's gonna say, hey, I don't think that was the right thing to say, or maybe you could have said it differently and you'll do it better next time. It takes a little bit of bravery.

I love that. And some of the bravery of being a good leader too is being able to listen and swallow that feedback when you get it and actually go and do something different and admitting that we, we don't always know what we're doing, but we're leading with hearts and that's kind of what matters as we're kind of wrapping up here. If you are listening and you have questions for these incredible panelists, please go ahead and start typing them into either the chat or the Q and A functionality. In the next few minutes, we're going to get to a little bit of open Q and A. But before that, I have a final question for Amit Goddard. I would like to hear from both of you. Amit, you can kick it off first. Times like these, we often get stuck in how hard they are. There have been some beauty that has come from strife in the past. We think about a company like Groupon that was born from the last recession and that entire company was born because people needed a way to experience the world and spend less money doing it. So now as you think about COVID what innovation at your company has been born due to Covid that you'll carry with you?

Well, I think there's, you know, I wish we didn't have to go through all of this, as I'm sure we all do.

But there are certainly a lot of

things first, like there is like less travel, more family time, less commute, a lot of more, a lot more connection, productivity, even just the location people. You know, we kind of mourn the energy in the office, like everybody together and we had like Gong is famous for that, right? And a lot of people really miss that and rightfully so. But now you have a lot of opportunity. You could hire people virtually anywhere, right? You could reach to talent pools that are very diverse. Maybe like find people like at different spots, give people the flexibility to live where they want. So there is a lot for us specifically, you know, we are proud that we help with the product both to help companies that are remote.

Right.

That don't have that energy. Right now salespeople are scattered like in different places and also improve what we're lacking in in person meeting, try to get to something like equal or better we online. So definitely there's a lot of pros that we're seeing from the situation. And I think by and large most tech companies, which I think is all the crowd would benefit in the longer term because the world will now go digital and virtual.

Yeah, I would agree. We've learned how to go virtual. I mean, that's what sales assembly did. We knew we wanted to launch, and then all of a sudden we said, we're going to do everything virtual. And we adapt. And when we adapt, we grow and we learn. So, Goddard, same question to you. What kind of innovation has been born? Bring us home.

Yeah, and I'd say, first of all, personally, I think, like Ahmed said, I'm enjoying the extra family time. There's probably never been three months in my career where I've been home for family dinner every evening. So that's been wonderful for me. And I think, and I think in terms of G2, I mean, one cool thing has been, and I think you were talking about digital transformation earlier, but we have seen a massive surge in G2 traffic. So businesses around the world are looking. I think our traffic's up 38% since the beginning of COVID More and more businesses are shopping for digital infrastructure. And the reality is, all of us in tech, we already had Zoom, we had Slack, but I think we saw traffic on video conferencing on D2 go up over 400%. And the reality is most businesses didn't have great digital infrastructure. And so I think we were somewhat lucky that now people that go to Google, they might be shopping for video conferencing, learning management systems, or even some categories like HIPAA compliant messaging, are all surging. And so that's been kind of lucky that more buyers are now exposed to G2. And obviously we're trying to now build a community to keep them coming back. But we do think a lot of the products we offer, all these digital products like Gong, or even doing research online, I think it's all accelerating. So I think in that sense, we're all lucky. And I think specifically at G2, we've also made some innovations, we made some changes. We have a G2 track product now that allows businesses to track all their SaaS and cloud spend. And since a lot of companies were looking to save money, we introduced a free trial to help companies immediately assess their tech and their cloud spend. And again, I think we're trying to use that to then make them permanent customers. That's free for 90 days, but then hoping to convert them, keep them forever. I think the final opportunity from us, from a company strategy standpoint, was to shift to smart growth. And so we have gotten much more efficient. We did make some hard changes, get more efficient. But I think now we're on a much more rapid path to profitability, but where we cut our EBITDA loss by about 80% over the last six months. And so now I think it's kind of relief. As an entrepreneur, I have a clear line of sight to profitability. And so I think there have been a lot of good opportunities in this crisis. And so I think we are believing we're going to come out of this much stronger.

I love the tactical pieces around the path to profitability and how you're looking at it and how even right now you can see the clear path and there's no delineation to it. So that's certainly expiring and I think would help a lot of people breathe a breath of fresh air and take a deep breath and exhale. So thank you all so much for the wonderful conversation today and for being a part of our community. At sales assembly, we talked about a lot of really important topics that deserve more time. So please reach out to myself or anyone on this panel to continue any of the conversations. Jeff, welcome back. Let's dive into a little bit of our audience Q and A. Thank you everybody.

Thank you, Christina.

I'm going to stop talking to myself and take myself off mute so everyone can hear me. There we go. You would have thought that after my 1000th Zoom call in the last quarter, I'd be good at this now, but, you know, still learning. Okay, so I got a couple of questions that have come in from the audience over the last half an hour. First one is going to be to Goddard. The idea is around managing the tech stack. I know you were just talking about this new product that you guys are rolling out, which sounds very interesting. But the question is the best advice for actually managing an effective tech stack. And I don't have any more context, but I would imagine this is around like the idea that a lot of companies sign up for a lot of products and then there's lack of implementation or lack of ownership. And this is kind of a world that you all play and obviously G2, you have your own stack that you manage as well. So any advice on that?

We do see tech stacks proliferating. I think the average enterprise now is running 1200 different cloud apps and services and even I think more mid market companies, like companies say our size with 3 to 400 employees typically running over 100 different SaaS and Cloud apps. And so I think it can be confusing and I do think Covid is giving everyone pause because frankly, the spend can End up rapidly, add up rapidly. And so that is why we did introduce G2 Track, right? So you can benchmark your spend and also find redundant apps. A lot of companies don't even realize maybe they have five different marketing apps, but they only need one. And I think our other big advice is also, we believe that apps, great apps are key to employee sat. And so one thing we've also rolled out in the G2 product where you could do it on your own, but also taking a pulse survey to see which of your apps do your users love and frankly, which ones are they frustrated with? Because especially now digital working remote, we're in apps pretty much all day and obviously if they love the apps, their employees watch will be much happier. So it really affects satisfaction. And we did a survey where some people even quit their job because if they're using a crappy salesperson, your CRM system is terrible and all your tools are really cumbersome. You might even just say, hey, this is worth it. And so we do see it being essential to also consider how much your employees love or hate your apps.

Awesome.

Thank you. Thank you for sharing. This is a question for, I guess the group kind of thinking about new managers that were recently promoted or brought into their first management, sales management role right around the time of COVID and now they don't have the benefit of one on one in person mentorship with other leaders. They don't have the benefit of working directly with their team for learning experiences on how to like conduct good one on ones and things of that nature. Any advice for a new sales manager who's been thrown into their first position as a manager but now working remote and having to kind of figure it out in that sort of kooky environment. Any general advice overall on that topic?

I think generally speaking, many of the tasks and activities that a sales manager would do can be conducted remotely. And so it's about building your system. This is what I tell any sales manager. Hopefully you have someone in your leadership team or the sales process that you can look to inside your company. But if you figure out what your cadence is with your team, with your boss, with your customers, how you build your week and you build that system, I think that it functions remotely just as well as it would in the office. So it's less about how you're communicating, but more about why you're communicating when and what, what the system and the cadence is that you've defined and just sticking to that.

Yeah, I would agree with Kate and I would say in addition, be Open, willing and ask for feedback along the way. So both from the people that report to you, but also from obviously your leadership team and your peers. Especially now being virtual and as a new sales manager, I think it's going to be really important to just have the pulse with your team ending each one on one. Like do you have any feedback for me or anything else that you are looking for from me and that will help you to start developing your rhythm and any sort of potential adjustments you need to make. But like Kate said, I think it's transferable to virtual once you get that rhythm down.

Awesome. Thank you. And just for those that weren't on at the very beginning, I'd like to note that I did call out the color of Samantha's blouse as coral and I didn't know that on my own. So I'm pretty, pretty impressed with myself on that one. Okay, last question. This one is for Amit and I'll preface by letting you know that the answer is not more subscriptions and licenses to Gong. Okay, so that's always the answer.

Right.

The question is, you know, looking out the next six months or even further, what are some new trends or some new innovations in sales enablement that you're predicting companies are going to start to incorporate or innovate on?

Well, I think we spoke about like for a lot of people that sold in person there's a lot of learning because a lot of them are still like maintaining existing relationship. The problem is how do you start new and that's a skill that we all need to learn. What we hear from a lot of organization, I call it like the that and I think we heard people are a lot more productive at home.

Right.

Because of the obvious reasons. The problem is like with I call them like the four E's like effectiveness, are they doing the right things? Energy.

Right.

This is like very stressful time for people educated. How do I spread information and new information like with. Within your organization and engaged.

Right.

I mean people said this is the greatest experiment in human history. That's right. Working remotely. But we've only been into this 90 days. And the long term impact, how does it work when there are people that you've hired that never met and never met anyone and how does long term engagement with the company work? That's still a challenge. So I think the key will be a lot of things to keep people on the 4e's productivity. There's definitely productivity gains but how do you not overwork people? How do you keep them connected, motivated and a lot of the effort is going to keep the team connected and focused in one direction.

That's awesome. And, yeah, I could. I know what it's like bringing on people in this environment. Christina, who moderated the panel, started with us a couple of weeks ago. Obviously, we've not had a chance to meet in person since she joined the team, but we've kind of compensated with just. I've been blowing her up with 4:30am text messages telling her ideas that I had on things that I'd like her to focus on for the day. So I think that route works well in lieu of in person meetings. So anyway, with that, I think we're going to have to call it there just to go ahead and parlay over to Todd Capone's presentation. But I would like to just once again, thank the panel. This was fantastic. Whenever we can get a group of such fantastic revenue and technology leaders at one time in one place from truly all around the world, from a conversation, it's really, really exciting. So thank you so much for joining. We are going to be recording today's session and we'll distribute it out afterwards as well. And with that, I will give the go ahead and salute to everybody and we're going to kick it over to Todd to take controls and take us home from here. So, Todd, come on in, my friend. And I'm going to go ahead and let you give your own introduction, which you can obviously do much better than I. And take it away, my friend.

All right. All right. So can you hear me? All right, Everything's good?

Yes.

Fantastic. You look dreamy as always. All right, so I need to share my screen and we will get going. All right, so how does that look? Do I look dreamy? Can you see me? Yep. Okay, cool. And looks good. Brick background. Cool. All right, perfect. So let's go. All right, so thank you for having me today. It's great to be virtually in San Francisco. Although I looked at the roster, there wasn't a whole lot of San Francisco Francisco there, but that's cool. So today what we're going to talk about is something that is called remote buyer bias. And if I could see all of you, I would ask who's ever heard of that bias? And the reason that the answer is probably not too many is because I made it up. And we're going to talk about it for a whole half an hour here. But I think it's really important to understand what is going on in the world and how we need to adjust the way that we take our messaging Our positioning, our prospecting, our presentations, even our negotiations to market, given the world that we're in. So with that, what I'd like to do is we're going to talk a little bit about high school. So let's start there for a moment. So if you remember back in high school, and I remember for me, my, it was, I think was sophomore year English class. So hang with me for a second here. I'm guessing this likely happened to you too. Sophomore year English class, I get assigned a book report to do. And so the teacher comes in and gives a list of 50 books that we can choose from to do this book report. And so I don't know about you, like how you picked what book report to do when that sort of thing would happen, but I looked at the list, it was a lot of the classics. So, you know, the Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby Dick, Of Mice and Men. Like there's the whole list there, right? What did you do to figure out what book you were going to pick? Now I'll tell you what I did. I looked at all the books and I didn't just select the one that was going to fulfill me the best. The book I chose was based on a couple of things. Number one, had I read any of these before? Number two, is there a movie on one of them that maybe I can choose from so that I can just watch the movie and then I'll read through the book So I can say I read the book, but a movie, I'd be knocked that out in a couple of hours. And then number three is, you know, I think CliffsNotes are still around. But back then I had, you know, there was this whole collection of something called Cliff's Notes, which is basically like a 15 page summary of the book. So I would look at those three and then go, all right, what's the optimal combination of these that's going to give me the shortest path to the best reward? Why does that matter? Well, let me take you inside a scientific study that was done at University College London a couple of years ago. Here's what I'm calling remote buyer bias. But here's study that was done where they brought a bunch of people into a lab and sat them in front of computers. And these computers had a bunch of dots on the screen. And either the dots would move to the right or to the left. And simply put, the participants, all they had to do was hold the little joystick and if the dots are moving left, they'd just move it left if the dots are moving right, they'd move it right. And that was the study. Super easy. But here's the trick. After they got started, they get about 30 seconds a minute into doing this back and forth. They decided to increase the tension on the move to the left on the joystick. So the joystick just became a little bit harder to push to the left than the right. What actually ended up happening is as the dots would move to the right, the. I'm sorry, as the move, the dots would move to the left. The people, the participants, would move the controller to the right. Their brain was trying to tell them that the dots are moving to the right, when in fact they were moving to the left. Now, why did this happen? Well, it's something called remote buyer bias. But essentially what it says is perceptual decisions are biased by the cost and effort to act, meaning that we're hardwired to follow the path of least resistance to the point where our brain will actually trick us into thinking that something else is happening based on how hard that path is going to be. And so if we take that to the world of sales, what remote buyer bias is is essentially that consensus selling was always hard, right? Like, we've seen so much about it. Like, I just did a Google search. So here's the screenshot of number of buyers in a typical consensus sale. Look, there's only 23,800,000 choices of articles I could read about making consensus sales. If you thought that was hard, imagine what consensus buying is like now where your buyers are not in the office. They can't just walk down the office and go, hey, Jane, come on in here, let's talk through this, run into somebody by the coffee machine and have a conversation about it. That can't happen. Every step is now gotten considerably more difficult through the buying journey for the buyers. Are we making it easier for them? Because at its core, for the buying brain, the journey is as or more important than the reward. Meaning I didn't choose the book that was going to fulfill me and give me the greatest grade. What I was looking for is what's going to give me a good grade for the minimum amount of effort. And that's what your buyers are doing today. So we need to look at the projects that we are working on with our prospects and customers and say, are we trying to say, hey, here's an A project no brainer. Look at the massive roi. The brains are actually combating that. So what we're going to do is I'm going to take you through five ways to create what I call the buying journey of least resistance. And we're going to go through these pretty quick. But I want to give you five tactical things that as soon as we get off this call, you can go implement. And just a warning I went through. I had Matt Green from Sales assembly give me the list of attendees that were going to be on this and I'm going to pick on a couple of you. Although you can't even participate the way it's set up, which is fine. But I went and I went through about 15 websites of the companies that were signed up to attend today and just give you a little feedback, a couple of things that you can do with your messaging. So if you're ready to go, I'm ready to go. Let's talk about the first one. And the first one I like to call Message like a mind reader. What does that mean? Well, in today's world that we're in, there's bad news, obviously, but there's good news too. And what's the good news? The good news is you can absolutely read the minds of your prospects and buyers today. Meaning when things are good, buyers could be considering purchases in so many product categories, they could be discretionary essentials. There's a million different things that they can choose from. But when things get tight, when the economy goes into an uncertain period of time, it turns out that all of our brains snap to the same exact prioritization. And if you know that you can take that and you can prioritize the way that you message so that you move to the top as you talk to these customers. So let's start with what that means. So in your personal world, let's go back to, you know, the beginning of March when this was all going down, right when all of this was starting to happen. What did you do? Well, I'm guessing the first thing that you did is you looked at your discretionary spending and said, you know what, I need to maybe ease off on the personal trainer. And then, you know, two weeks later they close the gyms anyway. But you know, I don't need that new couch right now that can probably weigh. Gosh, I was looking at maybe buying a new car, not going to do that. We looked at our discretionary spending and we said we're going to put all that stuff on hold. Right. The second thing that you probably did is you looked at your essentials. So what are the things that we need? Or I. Alright, are you guys hearing me? Okay, I'm going to go into the chat here. I just got a notification that there's a little issue with the audio. Are we good? Okay, cool. I can hear you. So we're going to keep going. So number one was get rid of the discretionary spending. Number two was to reduce costs on the essentials and extend your Runway. Meaning that's why we all ran to Costco and bought all the toilet paper and hand sanitizer, right? We are looking at our essentials. What are the things that we must have and say, all right, how do we make sure that we've got enough? And number two is how do we reduce costs on those? Like, for us, my wife loves the milk that we get at Whole Foods, but you can actually get the same milk essentially at Aldi for half the price. So we're going to go to Aldi, right? That's what we did. We're going to drive an extra two miles down the road to get gas that's 15 cents a gallon cheaper than the place that's right across the street. That's what we do. So that's number two. And then number three is we reduce risks, right? We look at what worst case scenario is going to be, and then we say, all right, how do we protect ourselves against it? I mean, like, you know, my wife's still grabbing mail from the mailbox using, like, salad tongs. I literally, I just saw the neighbor, our next door neighbor, older woman, out with the little clamp things, picking up her newspaper this morning. Like, that's what we do. We reduce risk, right? So it's those three things. Get rid of the discretionary, extend Runway on the essentials and reduce cost on those and then reduce our risk, right? Well, it turns out that's what people do when we hit times of uncertainty. It's also what every single company is doing exactly right now that becomes our priority. And so at its core, when I think about what we can do, we can actually read the minds of our prospects and buyers. This is an important point. Like, I wish you, like, write it down and just take it away with you is that if your messaging was created during an up market, it will typically fail in a down market. All right, so I'll let that sink in for a second. What's important to think about here is I'm gonna, like I said, I'm gonna pick on a couple of companies. So hopefully Serious Insights is on. So Serious Insights, for example, when I go to your website, is your website talking to me? Given what the priorities are of an executive today, you know, there's some things like, you know, wrestling the copy and paste emails, failing to keep Salesforce up to date, forgetting to follow up with a prospect. I would take that messaging and throw it out and then rewrite the messaging based on what's going on today. Like, why do those things matter? There's another company, Journera, that I went through. Like, I never heard of the company before. Sorry. But I went and I read through the website, and I was like, that technology looks amazing. Like, how cool is that? The problem is it's talking about engaging travelers and elevate their journeys, meaning it's focused on traveling and elevating the journey, which is super cool. It's like you go to a hotel and there's this whole process for getting upgrades and everything. I would take that messaging, throw it out, and then rewrite the messaging based on what's going on today, which is how are we going to capitalize on how customers are going to travel come the next couple of months? As that starts to ramp up, I think there's huge opportunities there. There's another one, Wellwright, that was on the call, whose headline is your people, your path, your wellness program. Empower and engage your employees. Grow and involve your companies. Build individuals and teams. I think there's an opportunity for you to escalate that message and kind of give it the so what now? So if we unwind for a second, everybody look at your messaging and think, why does what I'm saying right now matter right now? And if it doesn't, rewrite it and make it stand out to those three things. There's no discretionary. And one of the counterintuitive things that I'll tell you is revenue growth is discretionary. Right now, for most companies, that's a nice to have. If we can get revenue growth, awesome. But we're just trying to keep the wheels on the bus. So those are the priorities.

All right?

So messaging creating during an up market will fail in a down market. Again, escalates your messaging message like our mind reader. So that was number one. All right, let's go to number two. And number two, I think you'll be surprised. I'm going to talk about transparency, but of course, I believe in a world that we're in right now, embracing radical transparency has never been more important. And so by way of a little background and the story on what I mean by transparency, at my last role, I was the chief revenue officer of Chicago's Power Reviews. And if you haven't heard of them or you're not familiar I felt like I was talking to old buddies in that last panel with Goedert and Glassdoor, you know, G2 and Glassdoor. Because certainly in the review space, what Power Reviews did is focused on the retailers and brands. So when you're on a website, you're on crocs.com or vineyard, vines or Jet, and you're looking at the reviews under the products. That was Powell Reviews. That was helping those organizations collect and display those. All right, so we did a research study with Northwestern University a few years ago, and I was the chief revenue officer. I get this research study. It literally changed my whole life. Like, I quit my job and I wrote a book called the Transparency Sale. Right? But here's why this matters. The research study said, first of all, we all look at reviews today, right? For buying something of medium to high consideration, we will typically look at reviews if we have not bought the product before. So it was about 96% of us. But here's the data that changed my life. Number one, 82% of us skip the five star reviews and go right to the fours. Threes, twos and ones. We are wired to drive towards the negative reviews because we are wired as human beings to try to predict what our experience is going to be like with a product or service. And fives don't necessarily help us predict what our experience is going to be. And then this second piece was that the ideal average star rating for purchase probability. So on a product, if the average is between a 4.2 and a 4.5, that is optimal for purchase probability. Goedard was talking about in the panel about the fact that obviously different cultures, it skews a little bit differently. And some people won't give fives unless it's the greatest thing of all time. And threes and fours are sometimes better. This 4.2 to 4.5 is really across all product categories in all cultures. So some skills do a little higher, some lower. But the point is a 4, 2 sells better than a 5. Imperfection sells better than perfection. And we are wired to go for the negative first. And if we don't find it, we keep looking. And oftentimes we don't come back. Right? So embracing transparency and the negative stuff actually helps you sell more, which is amazing. So let's talk about a couple of examples. Let's first start with everybody's favorite retailer in the world, right? Everybody loves Ikea, I'm assuming. And if you haven't been like, go on a Saturday at like noon. It's just, it's Really a good time. The point being, Ikea, they are the number one furniture retailer in the world for, I believe, 10 straight years. The experience is a nightmare, right? Like, you go in, it's a labyrinth of hallways and. Or not hallways, but there's like curved paths with arrows on the floor. You can't find what you're looking for. You finally do. There's no salesperson around to help you out, so you have to write down the code or take a picture of it with your phone because you're going to the warehouse to pick it off the shelves. The 400 pound boxes, put it onto a cart that miraculously, in what seems like a massive oversight, doesn't have breaks, wheel it to your car, jam it in Tetris style, right? Like, if you're looking for something fun to do on a Saturday, just go hang out there and watch people do that and, like, count the F bombs. They drive home with a souvenir injury or two. They get home and they're like, all right, cool, we left the nightmare at the store. Let's put this thing together. That's where the fun really begins, right? You open the box, there's 150 parts, and there's not one single word on the work instructions other than the title, like Svarta or whatever the name of the brand is. You f bomb your way through that process and you get a little endorphin rush and you're like, wow, you know what? That looks pretty good. We probably should have bought the end tables with this bedroom set. Let's go back. It doesn't make sense, but it does in that when you think about your organizations and your companies, now is the time to figure out what is our pick it, pack it, put it into, like, jam it into our car and assemble it. And what is. What Ikea's true value proposition is, is they provide modern Scandinavian design furniture and you don't pay a whole lot for it. Every organization gives up something to be great at their core. Embrace that. Understand that if somebody walks into Ikea and says, I need a salesperson to help me feng shui my living room, and then I'm going to need it delivered and set up properly, IKEA's going to go, fantastic. Go to Room and Board, go to Crate and Barrel, go to Macy's, go somewhere else, that's not us. Each one of our organizations needs to do that, too. And here's why it's important. There was a story, and I know this picture might be a little disturbing, but I think it's funny. I was in New York the first time. I had just gone through all of this data and I got pulled into a meeting at Calvin Klein up in Manhattan. And I was the only one. I thought I was going in to just have coffee with the head of E Commerce, but as it turns out, he pulled me into his office, showed me a monitor so I could plug my laptop in to give a demo demo. I thought we were having coffee and I looked to my right and the room filled up with people. They had seven more people in this room. So there's nine of us in this tiny Manhattan office. They started the meeting by saying, all right, Todd, we had your competitor in here. You're in here. How are you? Better. Like, what makes power reviews better? And this was the time I thought, I got nothing to lose. I'm going to try this out. So I said, hey, you know what? Before we get too far in this process, can I share how our competitor is better? Because they literally just released something that not only isn't on our roadmap, but their first customer is in the apparel space. So if that's going to be really important, like, we're years away from being ready for that. Let's talk through that. You can feel the room completely disarm. And then we engaged in a dialogue about it where they were basically arguing about whether that was important or not. And at the end, they looked at me and they're like, we would not go to a ratings and reviews company for that technology. And so how would you handle it going forward? And then why have you decided not to do it? And it was basically like ikea. Our core is modern Scandinavian design furniture. You didn't pay much more. And the ancillary stuff, that's not us. What happened? And here's the important point is when you think about the remote buyer bias, give your customer the cons and the pros of going with you because you're giving them more homework to do when you present your products and services is perfect. The punchline here is that Calvin Klein threw out their RFP process, threw out the need to have us fly up to New York and do a big dog and pony show, and made a decision on us within 10 days in what normally would have been a six month sales cycle. So when you remove friction from the buying journey and do the homework for them, you speed up sales cycles dramatically. And why that's important is when you look across a typical consensus sale, how are those consensus buyers spending their time? Well, turns out only 39% of their time is spent talking to their internal buying groups, you or your competitors. That's the 22 plus the 17 here. It turns out that 61% of the time during a consensus purchase is spent doing other stuff. And when I say doing other stuff, you'll see that the couple of the companies you listened to already this morning, G2 and Glassdoor, are on here. Your buyers are going out and doing research beyond your claims. If all you're doing is presenting as though you're perfect, that's more homework. And that 61% is how your projects get deprioritized. So when we lead with our pros and our cons, that 61% goes away. And we speed sales cycles, we build trust, we increase win rates, we qualify deals in faster that we're going to win and qualify deals out faster that we're going to lose anyway. So that's number two is embrace radical transparency. Because right now it is so important. Number three is make choices for the buyer, make choices for them. And what does this mean? Well, this is one thing that E Commerce gets wrong. There was a Forrester quote from 2015 that said E Commerce would essentially take away 1 million B2B jobs by 2020. Now, that quote didn't age well. As a matter of fact, there's a lot more B2B sellers now than there was in 2015. But the point was that E Commerce was going to destroy B2B sales. Hasn't been the case. And part of the reason is E Commerce makes it really hard for you to choose. I mean, you can go buy a human finger on Amazon right now if you wanted to seriously look it up, you could buy anything. I picture the last time that you wanted to go buy somebody a gift but didn't know what to get. Just like trying to figure out what gifts to buy on Amazon is really, really hard. There's just too many choices and it's exhausting to the brain. And to that point, Remember back in 2018, as Toys R Us was going out of business, we happened to be driving by and at the time, my kids were 5 and 7. And as we're driving by, my wife's like, hey, they're having a going out of business sale. Let's go. So we told the kids, the kids were so excited. They were just jacked up. Just like, we're going to Toys R Us. Fast forward about 20, 25 minutes, we're back in the car. Each kid, you know, each one of my kids has a toy, but they're crying and they're exhausted. Why does that happen? Well, those are, those are kid brains, right? But human brains work exactly the same way that when we give too many choices to the buyer, it becomes overwhelming for them to make the right decision. There is that fear of missing out element that goes on. But it is our job as buyers or as sellers to reduce choice and help do the homework for the buyers. What happened in this case is my kids walked in, they looked at up and down the aisles. There's so many choices. My son, I remember, he was just like, I want that, I want that, I want that, I want that. He had like 20 different things that he wanted. And finally after we're sitting there for quite a long time, it was time to go. And my kids could not make a choice. They were angry. My wife finally narrowed down the choices for them. They picked one and when we got out in the car, they were both disappointed with what they ended up choosing. That's what will happen in your case too. So I want you to think for a second about the journey that you take buyers on and recognize that your role is kind of more like a Sherpa than you know. It's not like you're working in a drive thru window where there's a big menu and you let the customer choose. It's up to you to be the guide because that builds confidence in the buying process as well. Imagine you're going to Mount Everest and the Sherpa, when you meet up with them, says, hey, which way you want to go? It's a big mountain. You tell me, we could go any way you want. You just be like, I'm pretty sure we're gonna die, right? Like you want a Sherpa who is going to say, here's what we're gonna do and here's the process to get you to what you're trying to achieve. In many, in much the same way. Think about it like a personal trainer. A personal trainer is there to listen, to understand what you're trying to achieve, but in many ways help push you to achieve more than you thought you could. The future of sales is about being a personal trainer to these people. You wouldn't walk into a personal trainer and tell them what equipment you're going to use and how you're going to use it. And they're just sitting there to guide you. Two weeks later, you'll be in the chiropractor's office. So make decisions for your buyers, narrow it down to a very select few, and you're going to see that that Friction in the buying journey goes down. And as a matter of fact, sales cycles will speed up as well, too. Number four is eliminate and or combine steps in your sales process. And this one's really quick and really easy to understand. But I wanted to just give you a quick example when you look at the journey that you take your buyers on. Recently, I was looking to buy a piece of technology that I used actually for conducting virtual sessions like this. I reached out, I filled out a lead form, and what happens? So my excitement level is about here when the lead form comes in. All right, so we're about here. I wait a few hours. They finally get back to me. We schedule a meeting. What happens? We get in the meeting. My excitement levels about here because other priorities have come up. I'm not as excited as I was when I filled out the lead form. I get on the phone and what do they do? They spend a half an hour qualifying me and doing discovery questions. Like, okay, great. Like, let me see. Let me see it. Like, I'm trying to get my answers, my questions answered. Like, you just got all of yours answered. When is it my turn? Oh, we're going to schedule another meeting for that. Like, all right, so two days later, we're down here. My excitement level has dropped even more. Then what happens? We get on the phone, they do a demo, and the demo uses nothing from the discovery. I'm glad I used that time, and now I'm down here at the bottom. So when we think about what you want to be looking at, I mean, think about this process. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Is seeing that statue at the top of this stairwell worth all the steps to get there? Right now more than ever, when we think about remote buyer bias, the important thing for you to think about is how can we build an elevator, Right? Combine steps, remove steps. If you're doing separate qualification and discovery calls, stop it. Blend it. When I'm excited about potentially a solution with you, and I'm an inbound lead, help me answer my questions. All right. Because if you're introducing friction to the buying journey, there's other priorities, other things come up. Your win rates will go down with extra steps. So consolidate steps. And then number five, last but not least, is negotiate transparently. And what this means. There's actually two definitions here. Number one is right now, when we're trying to prioritize what we're going to purchase, playing games in the negotiation process sucks. Right? It's just. It's a nightmare for the buyer. It's a nightmare for you, it erodes trust right at the goal line. As a matter of fact, most of what we do at the goal line is designed to erode trust. The customer says, yes, and you say subconsciously, all right, I'm going to start lying to you. I'm going to start with an extreme position. I'm not going to tell you what any of the levers are. You got to figure those out and we'll work and figure out what a good deal is. Well, what negotiating transparently means is to play your cards face up instead. So what that means is in a deal that I did a few years ago, that's kind of when I accidentally stumbled upon this. But I'm guessing that your levers are exactly the same is I walked into a room and there was six procurement people ready to kick my butt. It was a million and a half dollar deal a year for three years. And I knew we were about to play the lying ping pong that is traditional negotiation. So instead of doing that, I said, hey, before we start, can I write four things on the whiteboard? The four things that we care about as an organization. And those four things are how much you buy, how fast you pay, how long you commit, and when you sign. And those are the four things that we're willing to pay you for in the form of a discount. So that when they asked for a discount, we were able to go through each one of those four and negotiate card space up to the point where they were instantly negotiating their own deal. Meaning commit to more technology. We'll pay you in the form of a discount for that. Pay us faster. So instead of paying monthly or quarterly or annually, pay us for the whole contract up front. We'll pay you in the form of a discount for that. You got a one year commitment. Extend that to three years and we'll pay you in the form of a discount. And let's mutually agree on the timing of when this deal is going to get done. And I'll pay you to hold to it because there's value to me and my organization and being able to predict our business. That's transparent negotiating. And there's a lot more detail behind that. But simply put, you can actually build trust to the goal line and get something of value for every dollar you give away in the form of a discount. And last but not least here, and negotiating transparently, I just want you to remember the last time that you downloaded a piece of software on your computer. Did you see something like this, which is an end user license agreement? Did you read It I'm guessing you didn't, right? You probably just went there. Whatever hit, next hit, I accept the agreement and off you go. Now why is it in enterprise sales that that never happens? Nobody ever just clicks through the agreement. It's because inherently there is no trust. We deliver contracts that have one way terms on them, like auto renewal language that has a required notification period of like 90 days, that if you don't negotiate, if you don't tell us that you're canceling, within 90 days of renewal, you're renewed. Or you know, price increases or commitments to case studies or marketing. We have wired lawyers to beat the crap out of our contracts because we put in one way terms. When we think about remote buyer bias, it's about removing one way terms and potentially delivering a little cover sheet that will help the lawyers decide and understand our perspective on what we did and why we've done it the way we did. Lawyers are people too. And when you can make that process easier for them, you speed things up, they prioritize it as well versus the hard contracts and you get your deals done faster. So to wrap up, first of all, message like a mind reader. Remember, every company and every individual is prioritizing three things right now. Your messaging needs to hit that. Reduce discretionary spending, look at your essentials and extend the Runway on those. And reduce costs and reduce risk. That's it. Hone your messaging into that. Number two, embrace radical transparency. Remember a four two to a four five sells better than a perfect five score. Both when a website is acting as the salesperson and when a human being is. Lead with your negatives, lead with the flaws. Think like Ikea and embrace what you're giving up to be great at your core. Number three is make choices for them. You're their Sherpa, you're their personal trainer. Don't leave it to them because that creates more work. And again, thinking back to that study at the beginning about the joystick, handle that if you create more tension in going in one direction, you'll see that your customers will prioritize other projects. So make it easy for them. And again, that also leads into looking at your buying journey. Combine steps, give the customers what they want, create and maintain that energy and you'll see your customers are prioritizing you. And last but not least, transparent negotiating is a way to build trust right through the goal line while also getting something of value for every dollar you give away in the form of a discount. So embrace those things. So with that, those are the five ways to reduce the concept of remote buyer bias when all of our buyers are remote. And I'll turn it back over to Jeff if there's any questions that have come up along the way.

Awesome, Todd. Thank you, man. I've heard you speak on various topics for multiple years and you always bring the heat, man. So I appreciate, appreciate all the knowledge. A couple of questions that have come in. I'll just hop right into them. So this one is about field reps that are kind of having trouble breaking through the noise right now. Given everything going on. What advice would you share for SDRs that are just having trouble kind of advancing their pipeline?

So there's noise in their pipeline. So there's kind of two pieces to that, I think. Breaking through the noise. Let's handle that for a second. One thing that I think is so important right now is to have true empathy for the people that you're targeting. And what true empathy means is when I was a CRO, I was getting 100 to 150 emails per day and I was in 30 to 35 meetings per week. When I would open my email inbox, it was filled with white noise that typically started with, I wanted to like, hey, I wanted to schedule 15 minutes with you. I wanted to see if you received my last message. I think that there's a real opportunity to focus your messaging on being personalized, being valuable, like provide value to me and just be a giver. There's another guy, Josh Braun, that talks about this idea of you would never make withdrawals from the bank until you've made a deposit. And think about that with the people that you're reaching out to. An unknown potential vendor is very low on the priority list of the executives that you're talking to right now. They're typically prioritizing their team, their customers, their prospects. Be a giver. Give them things that are going to help them in their day to day work. And then when the time is right, you can make that withdrawal because you've built a relationship based on trust and based on being able to provide to me and understanding that you know what I'm dealing with and you can be helpful to me. So I think that's number one. And then number two, you know, Jeff, you mentioned the, you know, along the journey, along that process, I think these things that we just talked about are going to help you just provide the cons and the pros, like help them make decisions. Because if there are cons, they're going to figure out them out. G2 and Glassdoor were on that panel Today because the proliferation of reviews and feedback and everything we do buy and experience means that you've got to lead with your flaws anyway because they're going to find them. But the behavioral science tells us that it works better. So do those types of things, you'll build trust and you'll accelerate your deals.

Great. Next question. So I imagine this is just based on the fact that you're really old and you've been in sales and sales leadership for a long time. So the question is, what do you see today that's I'm phrasing it wrong. What's no longer relevant as it pertains to B2B tech sales today than might have been in the past? So I guess I would take that as like, are there technologies that are no longer working? Are there strategies or philosophies that like, used to be really popular that now it's just like, yeah, don't even waste your time.

But yeah, you've tapped into my sales history part of my brain because I'm like, that's my jam right now. I'm so digging sales history. I'm going to answer that two ways. Number one, I just posted on LinkedIn this morning a article from May of 1921. So again, 99 years ago from Tractor World magazine and it was the 10 traits of a successful salesfor person. And they are all exactly relevant today. Like you would look at them and not disagree with any of them. It was 99 years ago. So at its core there's a lot of things that have just never, never changed, you know, like don't exaggerate, be genuine, be courteous, only make promises that you can live up to. So those types of things. But to fast forward a little bit, back in the late 90s, I sold for SAP and I think I did really, really well. But I think genuinely I was like a B, B minus sales rep back then. But one of the policies that we had back then, it was because it was hard for customers to find out the truth anyway. We were literally told and we literally told our pre sales and solution engineers to the answer is always yes. Customer asks a question, the answer is always yes. If it's not something we recommend, we would start by saying yes. But here's another way to think about it to try to divert them away. But that's no longer relevant today. I mean you can't lie to customers or even stretch the truth or exaggerate and expect to get away with it again. The way we're wired as human beings is to resist Being unduly influenced anyway. And so as a result, when you lie, your customers can sense it. It's contagious. So stop that. I think that's, you know, that's obviously the core one. I could probably list off about 10 others, but that's a big one for me. Awesome.

Great.

And then the last question. This obviously from somebody that read your most recent book, the transparency sale. When is your next book coming out and what's it going to be called?

Whoo. All right. Am I announcing this or so I was actually. I woke up so my son came running in at like 4 in the morning and he had a boogie. And so like he woke me up. And then like when that happens at 4 in the morning, your motor gets going and I'm just like, all right, I gotta get to this. But I do. The proposal is done for book number two. I have three publishing offers. I'm trying to decide whether I want to go that route or go out on my own this time. But the working title is the Transparent Sales Leader. And it's a leadership framework based on. Jeff, you've heard me talk about the five Fs, but it builds a bunch of behavioral science into it. But it's just a simple sales management sales leadership framework that basically will guide your strategy, your planning, your communication, up, down, side to side, and it'll help you get that next sales leadership job because it sets you out ahead of everybody else because you'll be the only one that has a sales leadership framework when you go to interview against 10 other people. So that's the goal. I was hoping to have it out in the spring, but obviously Covid's turned things around a little bit. So that's. The next spring is still my goal, but I'm guessing it'll probably be next summer.

Okay, awesome. Well, looking forward to reading it. Todd, thanks so much for your time this morning. This was great. We'll be sending around a recording of the session from the panel this morning and then Todd's thought leadership here as well. And to everyone on the call, thanks for joining us. Two more stops on our roadshow tomorrow, Denver and Austin. Salesassembly.com roadshow. If you want to sign up for any of our last two events, please feel free and look for the follow up email here in a couple of hours with some additional details, including an invitation for a couple of your reps to join us for a training workshop coming up in July. So with that, thank you everyone for joining us and I hope you have a great rest of the day and closer to the quarter. Thank you.