In this Revenue Today episode, host Jared Robin moderates a roundtable with sales leaders Joe Caprio, Ed Jaffe, Jorge Soto, Tyson Goeltz, and Noah Weiss. The conversation centers on designing sales meetings that foster genuine dialogue. Key themes include using discovery questions—especially “why” probes—to shape and personalize demos, the pitfalls of generic qualification frameworks (BANT, MEDDIC) that ignore customer use‑cases, and the importance of aligning Account Executives (AEs) and Sales Engineers (SEs) throughout the buyer journey. Participants share practical tactics such as the “stand‑up/sit‑down” (or mute/unmute) rule to manage speaking turns, strategies for handling budget discussions early versus later, and ways to prevent power struggles between AEs and SEs by defining role responsibilities per meeting stage. The panel emphasizes collaborative preparation, shared storytelling, and a buyer‑centric experience over siloed hand‑offs, aiming to keep meetings fluid, engaging, and outcome‑focused.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
You know, Tyson, something you just said had me laughing about how do you use discovery to influence what you demo. And I have this company that I'm working with right now where I'm watching their demos, I'm watching the game tape. And, you know, it's a disco demo hybrid in this situation. They do like a 45-minute first call, a little bit of disco, quick demo, deeper conversation, and then agree to a big second call. And so I'm watching it and it's like, We're doing the baseline, you know, tell me about your tech stack, you know, tell me about your team structure and like, tell me about like, which of my 3 value props do you think is most compelling to you? And then they go right into the demo and never once is there like a why, either why that matters to you or why they think the problem actually happens in the first place. And that why is gonna put them on an A or a B fork in their demo. And because they're not asking, you know, you could frame your product as like, you know, it works this way or it works that way. We all have like slight slight differences in how we might explain the product. Like to the example earlier, someone who's more security conscious or not, we might go into a feature, we might not. We might lead with value prop A and then close with B or switch it. You know, we might change our demo based on that discovery. Yeah. And I had this epiphany where I'm watching the discovery and I see the moment where if he just said, hey, why do you think that problem actually starts in the first place? and the customer said A or B, 5 minutes later when his sales engineer is doing the demo, the sales engineer is gonna slam dunk that part of the demo.
Mm-hmm.
But the person didn't ask the question. So we don't actually know why the customer thinks that goes wrong. And then the sales engineer takes a guess and demos to the wrong pitch and the whole meeting falls apart. The whole meeting falls apart. And, and after we watched the film and, and we talked about it and I was like, and I had this epiphany where I'm like, wait, like you're discovering Discovery is your discovery. It's BANT or MEDDIC or whatever. But like, there are 2 to 3 moments where your discovery is just literally to set up a moment of the demo and you could almost like tie them together. You know what I mean? And when your sales engineer is watching you say, hey, why does that go wrong in the first place? They're drooling because they're like, whichever way this customer zigs, I know exactly how to get right in front of them and slam that demo home. And it's like, I don't know, man. Like, is this something that I just thought of for the first time and guys like you were just like, yeah, Joe, like, you know what I mean? But there were some discovery questions that are just meant to show you or your partner exactly how to tailor the demo and you guys have like kismet, like, you know, a mind meld about it, or, you know, does that not actually exist anywhere?
I mean, it's Joe, I think of it, it's what's the difference between discovery and qualification? And I think those things often kind of get sort of put together, even those frameworks you're talking about, like BANT, budget, authority, need, time, nothing about that is a use case. And so what's funny too is it's so obvious, I think, to customers when somebody is doing BANT or something else. So I'm in my role, I'm, you know, I'm a buyer as well, and I've bought various technologies for things that we've done. I have started so many meetings where I've literally had the rep say, what's your budget? I don't know. Can we find a use case first? Like, If you can, if we can craft something compelling enough, maybe I can find a budget, but it's not like my boss has just given me a check and say, go, just go figure this out. That rarely happens. And so that's, I think oftentimes you're kind of, especially when you're competing with the status quo of you're trying to rip something out, what's the budget? Well, here's what we're paying this company. I want it for 10 grand less. Like,
Yep.
You end up in a price war immediately versus let's actually figure out why we're in the room. Can we come up with a use case? And then we'll get into that stuff. Because without that, what am I demoing?
Budgets, just on budgets. I love budgets. I love budgets when they exist. Like I really do. But again, I went, I've been zero to, you know, 3 times. Like I don't, I don't work in companies where people come out of a meeting and say, you know what, we really got to set aside budget for that thing no one's ever frickin heard of before. Nobody is like setting aside budget for this problem that I'm cold messaging them, baiting them onto a Zoom call, and then showing them 3 customer stories so they can Goldilocks pick the one that applies to them. And then we mutually aha that maybe they have a project we should work on together. If my next question is, what's your budget for this project? They're gonna look at me like I'm an absolute maniac, like an absolute crazy person. All right. So, hey, I know, I know, it seems like George is having some technical difficulties, but he prepped me before the call. So maybe I'll ask some of the questions on his, on his behalf, and we'll just kind of move ahead. The next thing he was gonna try to get us to, to talk about was like the running of the meeting, you know? So you've got an, an account exec and a sales engineer, and the whole point is you want to get into this natural flow of, of storytelling to start a good dialogue. How do you run the meeting? What's the AE doing? What's the SE doing? Ed, Tyson, you guys wanna take a stab at this? Like, whose job is what here?
I mean, I think it kind of depends on, on the meeting itself. So the way that I sometimes think about that, I think that you can often have this power struggle between the SE and the AE because everyone, everyone wants to talk.
And— Ed, you know what, why don't I just answer that? I'm just teasing you.
I, I, I, you know, I'm so used to that. I'm just like, okay, this is just, just the AE stepping in again. Cool. Uh, no, but I think, you know, especially when the prep is, hey, let's meet at Starbucks for half an hour before, before the demo and we'll trade slides and we'll be fine. And then it's more about who's running the deck, which isn't really the thing. I think about it more like a TV series. And so think about a TV season. You have different episodes and each episode is driving the story in a different way. And so you, some episodes are going to focus on one character versus another. And so rather than try to kind of have a power struggle over this particular meeting, there's some meetings that the AE is the focus and I'm more in a support role if I'm the SE. And sometimes it's going to be the reverse of that. That kind of helps set who's going to be responsible for what. And I think that way you have kind of clarity. You think about the deal more as a cycle than like, how are we going to survive this one meeting? What are we going to do kind of in the next 3 meetings? And you really start to game that out. You get to a much better place. That also even stops some of the cutting off that's happening. And then I think the other thing, even just on that cutting off, there are some great tactics you can use to keep that from happening. Something that we do a lot, we talk about to win, is the idea of stand up, sit down. And there's an online version, which is mute, unmute. So if you're in the room, let's say I'm talking and, you know, Joe, you're the— you have something you wanna add, just stand up. And then I know that you wanna say something. When I'm ready, I'll call on you. I'll sit down. One stage, one actor. The audience knows, focus on you. Then you sit down, comes back to me, and I keep going. What that also lets you do is sometimes you get in those, those situations where you're trying to talk and then I move past what you were gonna say, and then you're in this awkward, oh, I don't— you just sit back down. So, and virtually just go mute and then unmute when— and we do this all the time. If, you know, someone's coming off mute, I know they wanna say something, I'll pass it to them. It just, it makes it so much smoother.
I actually find that, that rule to be like really, really effective in controlling a meeting and keep it like keeping it copacetic. But to the point where now I'm watching the audience and I'm looking for prospects. that come on off mute or even just change the position in their seat. And then I'm inviting them and I'm saying, hey, Tyson, I noticed you were kind of coming alive a second ago. Did you have anything you wanted to add? And I'm getting the right people involved in the meeting based on that rule. Hey, George, we were just, we were just goofing around. We were just talking about music and stuff while you were gone. I don't know if you want to get back into the content. No, no, we went on without you, man. We are like halfway through the, the next question. And, and I have a feeling you were gonna try to prompt us to talk about like, like rules of engagement between an AE and SE when it comes to like blocking calendars and who, who's supposed to prep who. But I don't know who, who you were gonna call on in the moment, so I'll kick back to you and let you call on—
You did a hell of a job, Noe.
Thanks so much. Yeah, so I, I think, you know, in terms of the sep— second topic, you know, that alignment between AE and SE Have, did y'all discuss, uh, what the differences are between that demo, uh, that an AE delivers versus an SE?
I think we were just getting into that.
All right.
Yeah.
Awesome. Ed, you wanna maybe, uh, continue on that path?
Sure. I mean, I, I have a lot of thoughts. I have a lot of thoughts on this. I mean, I, I think that one of the challenges I often see, and I think where we were talking when you, right before you came back on about just the idea of this power struggle between roles and where I often see it happen is when You kind of have, you know, the SE thinks, well, the AE's not setting me up. We're just doing, you know, they're just telling me to do what I normally do. They get frustrated. And then on the other side, when the AE just kind of looks at, you know, the SE is like a demo monkey, then that's— no SE wants to be in that role where they're literally just pushing buttons and giving a demo and nobody wants to do that. And so I sometimes, I used to think it was very clear. AE does the first meeting, SE does the later one, and that's just how you're happy. But I don't know if it's always that simple because I— As the SE, I want to be on that discovery call where I see a lot of those calls go. A lot of those first calls kind of go south is an SE comes in cold and they were supposed to look at the notes in Salesforce, but the notes either weren't there or it was like, I talked to Tyson, he'll be in the room. He's the CRO. Okay. Like, I don't know what to do with that. And so I'll end up like, if I'm in that situation as the SE, I'll do discovery for half the meeting before I show something. Because I'm gonna— I'd rather show 1 or 2 really valuable things that I know drive value than show 10 and hope they find something they like. That, that's not a winning strategy.
Ed,
oh, you have a thought.
I, I 50% agree with you. I agree entirely with the part of you that wants to show relevant product and therefore has to fix discovery on that, on that second meeting. But I'm cringing thinking about what the Customers going through, getting what sounds like shoddy discovery from the AE, and then having to do that again because because you guys aren't communicating. And so I agree with you. If I show up to a call and I don't know what's going on, I'm not just guessing. I'm trying to pull the details out as smoothly as I can. But like, what a what a horrible like just like what a horrible experience to have to go through discovery multiple times. Like it just highlights the need for for these people to to work together and deliver an experience to the buyer, which is what it's about. It's not about my job, your job, my meeting, your. Who's in charge? Like we gotta come together and service the customer for our own good. You know.
Well, what I the thing I think that's making you cringe. That's my plan B. Plan A. No, no, I know that. I know what I'm doing.
Whoa! Another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in RevGenius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds, and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side. Thank you.
