4 Strategies I Used to Become the Top AE at My Company

The first couple years as an ae, I struggled pretty bad. I barely hit quota. I think I hit quota once in my first two years and it was just a rough go. However, by the time I was wrapping up my time as an ae, my win rate was double the company average. I want to walk through four things that I changed as I went from the bottom of the sales floor to the top and how you can implement the same. The first thing I did is I created my own account scoring model that ensured I worked with the accounts most to purchase. Look, sales operations. Their job is to balance territories at scale. Their job is not to dictate where you as an individual rep spend your time. And so while our company gave us account score, they gave us a priority list. I found that it was directionally helpful ish, but it wasn't actually valuable for where I should focus my priorities. And so what I did is I developed a system based on potential use case, likely budget and my familiarity to determine where I should spend my time. And a lot of the time I found my best accounts where the accounts the sales op said were not worth spending time in. So walking through those three areas, first off, use case, I wanted to look at the company and see where would my product fit in. And so when I was working with a company that sold customer experience, brand experience and employee experience solutions, I was looking at how many channels they had to engage with the customers. The more channels to engage the customers, the more places you can measure the customer experience. So the more channels, the more use cases. Now at MongoDB, it's all about how frequently they are building applications. So I'm looking at how many applications they have, how many engineers that they've hired. And so first point, again, use case as you're doing your account prioritization, the more people at the account that could use your solution, the more potential avenues to go land in the account and have conversations. So more use cases, the better. The second one is the potential for budget. I'm not asking you to be able to look at your accounts and know how much budget they have. I'm not sure that anybody can do that. But I am encouraging you to think about what accounts are likely to be spending on tools similar to yours. Two ways I like to do this. One, I like to look at growth of target departments. So for example, again at MongoDB, selling a solution to engineers, a really good indicator for us is if they are hiring more engineers, more engineers means they are likely building more applications. The more applications they build, the more likely they are to be investing money into database solutions. The other piece is are they using competitive solutions? So in addition to seeing if my target departments were hiring and growing within an account, I would also look and see if any of the job descriptions or LinkedIn profile pages had mentioned of any of our competitors tools. Because if they're spending right now on another solution that solves the problems that we solve, then we know that they are budgeting to solve the problems that we solve. And the final piece was familiarity. I learned as an AE that even the best accounts weren't that useful to me if I didn't understand them well enough to have intelligent conversations with the account. So one of the questions I would ask myself and then as a sales leader I'd ask my AES is look, if you were on an on site with this company in front of their CEO, CMO, CFO, etc. How comfortable would you be having a value based business discussion with them, using their terminology, understanding their likely pain points. Because the reality is, especially earlier in your career, you probably don't have incredible business acumen across all industries and all companies. And so even if you have an account that might be a great fit for your solution, if you're not familiar with them, you're going to have a really hard time breaking into it. So again, to summarize, as I was looking at my priorities for my territory planning, I was trying to find the accounts that had multiple use cases, signs that they had budget or would create budget for my solution and then finally, how familiar am I with that industry, that company type to allow me to go have meaningful conversations easier than companies where I know nothing about their industry and their business model. The second change I made was always entering discovery with a point of view and the value hypothesis. Early on I went into discovery completely open ended, completely open minded and I was hoping the buyer would go educate me on their role, their company and where my solution could fit. And I remember just getting shut down by especially senior level buyers saying things like look man, you asked me for this medium, why don't you just tell me what you do? So I stopped asking questions like tell me about your role, how does your company make money? Superficial questions. And instead I came prepared to get deep into how we could likely help them. My hypothesis of what I thought they'd care about, what I could learn about their current state from research I brought into the conversation prior to the call and that allowed me to get much deeper into discovery faster. And I found that as I did this, coming with that point of View, the conversations were much more rich and I was able to engage the buyer in a much better conversation. Now, once I got to the demo stage, I had a lot of work to do. When I compare my early demos to my later stage demos, I learned that I had to design my product demos to match as closely as possible to how the customer would actually use our solution. People usually buy things that they know how they would use and how they'd benefit. People don't buy things that look cool, but they have no idea how it would fit into their environment. And so I had to learn to eliminate phrases like 30,000 foot view and high level overview because my buyers didn't care about that. That was the information they could get from our website, from YouTube, from other places, the kind of education they could get self learning. By the time they were getting to an account executive conversation, they were hoping for much more specificity and much more depth. And so as you're thinking about your upcoming demos, don't go give the high level product tour, don't go click through all the functionality that you offer. Put yourself in the buyer's shoes. If you were to go give them access today to your solution for free, how would they use it? Then build your demo. So they leave the conversation thinking, I know how I would use this, I know how it's going to benefit me and I know how it would benefit me in a better way than alternatives and you're going to find that your win rates increase. The final change I had to make was maintaining control of deals. Even at the end of the deal cycle. Early in my sales career, when I got to the point where the buyer would say, hey, we have the proposal, we've seen the demo, we know what you do. Let us think internally and get back to you. Early on in my career, my response would be, sounds great, I can't wait to hear what y' all think. When do we reconnect? And I found that at that point the deal fell apart because my buyer was not an expert at buying even if they were legitimately interested. Because I know that the lettuce get back to you can sometimes be a smokescreen for disinterest. But a lot of the time they actually do have interests. They just need to figure out how to buy. So what I found is my buyers that didn't know how to purchase would go sink internally, completely lose steam because they didn't know what has to happen next later on in my selling career. I knew that was a cue. When they say, let us think internally and get back to you, I would have to maintain control by walking them through exactly what they likely would have to do next to get approval. I'd say, great, that makes perfect sense. This is usually the stage when we need to get broader buy in from supporting teams. If it's okay with you, I'd love to walk you through how other organizations often handle the stage, who they talk with, what they share with them, and that way we can make a good plan together on how you can bring those teams up to speed as quickly as possible with my support. Then, because they were always okay with that, always open to my help, I'd walk them through how to get it involved, how to get finance involved, how to get legal involved. Then I'd even walk them through, here are the things you're going to be worried about, here are the things you're going to need to bring to them to proactively resolve their concerns. And here's how I can give that information in a really easy consume, easy to consume way to make these conversations much easier for you. So instead of just saying or ending that, let me get back to you after we've seen internally conversation, which sounds great. It was more of, okay, that sounds perfect, but I'm going to equip you with everything you need for those conversations and we're going to schedule touch bases before you meet with them, after you meet with them to make sure that we're handling all their concerns as quickly as possible. By doing this, the buyer still felt like I was giving them the room to go get internal consensus because we're not. Not always. In fact, we're rarely going to be in the room when decisions are made. But while the buyer felt they were getting that space, I was still maintaining control by helping them understand exactly who to talk to, how to talk to them, and then providing them specific assets for each different stakeholder to make a compelling argument for why our solution should be implemented. I hope most of you don't have to go through two years of failure to learn these lessons. Hopefully this video on the mistakes that I made and how I overcame them helps you learn and have success a lot faster minded. If you found this video helpful, let me know I'm going the right direction by leaving a like on this video. Then if there are any questions or topics you want to make sure I cover in a future video, leave me a comment. 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