Whale Hunting: Negotiating, Handling, and Closing

I got to start off by letting you all see my sock game. If you're in the front row, I hope you can appreciate that we got the Golden Gate Bridge going on today. I'm really excited to be here. I'm here with Andrea Austin from Inside View, and I'm here with Marc Jacobs from Greenhouse. And Andrea, let's start off with a quick background for the audience. Tell the audience about yourself.

Absolutely. So I always like to say that anything past 20 years in technologies is just 20 plus years. So 20 plus years in technology. Started my career in college at IBM, so definitely worked for the man. And I've been working with Inside View for the last two years and I've dabbled in some of the valley companies. So 20 plus years.

Great, Mark, go ahead. Thank you.

I'm not quite 20 plus, but close to 20 years of enterprise sales experience. But anyway, I am really thankful to be here and I appreciate everyone coming. I'm VP of Sales at Greenhouse. Since hiring is one of the most important initiatives at a company hiring really good talent, we provide the tools necessary to help everybody within the organization to more effectively source, interview, hire, and onboard the best possible candidates for a given role. I've been with Greenhouse for almost a year and a half now, and we've grown our sales team from 10 to over 60 people. And like I said, I'm really excited to be here.

Great. Welcome, Mark. Good. Just to get everybody the lay of the land, what we're going to do here. I'm going to start off with a few questions for Andrea and Mark just to get the juices flowing. And then I see a few people in the audience that I know will have some good insightful questions. So we'll turn the. We'll turn the mic over to you all very quickly so that you all can get your questions answered. Okay, so we'll get. We'll get started with just a couple of structural questions. And Andrea, maybe you can start us off. Just tell us how you define enterprise at Inside View.

So enterprise, and every company does it a little bit differently. We actually treat the enterprise as the size of client and we base it on employee companies with employees, 2,500 employees and more. We certainly operate that at our business level. We have also a channel sales team and we structure that very similarly. So we have an SMB sales team and then we have an enterprise sales team. And the cutoff is very similar. We go on employee size.

Okay, great. Mark, maybe to add some color to that, can you give us some perspective? I know your background you worked at VMware, you worked at Thomson Reuters, you worked for some very big companies. Now you're working for a startup. Can you give us some perspective on how the enterprise role might have been treated differently at prior companies you worked at?

Yeah.

So it is very different at a startup, not only because it's a startup, but the SaaS industry side sales model that we have is very different than what you have at some of the larger companies that I've been a part of. When you look at, you know, how we define enterprise right now, we define. It depends on right now. For our company at Greenhouse, we're defining it based on the number of employees at the company that the companies have. And we separate our we segment based off of 0 to 100, 100 to 1,000 and above 1,000. At larger companies, you could be dealing with just the Fortune 500 or even the Fortune hundred that are considered enterprise. And the way that they deal with it and the way we dealt with it there is very different. In fact, you have a lot of folks that, and I think Andrea is someone that did this as well, that have maybe one or two accounts and an enterprise sales rep, and that's what they're focusing on. They might have a huge quota based off of that one account. Where we look at it now, it's just different. It's just a company that has a more complex business buying process. It's going to take a little bit longer to get through the process. You have to navigate through it. That's the difference how we look at whether something's enterprise or not. Because it could be a large company, it could be a medium company, it could be anything. That actually takes a longer, more sophisticated, complex buying process.

Yeah. And I think to add to that enterprise accounts, we found that that cut, whatever, if it's at 1,000 or 2,500, the procurement process and the number of influencers that get involved in the deal just intrinsically changes. So a cutoff in the selling motions are sometimes different for a more transactional sale than when you get into that more complex environment. So you have to understand how to preserve something for procurement, understand how to appease it, and then obviously coach your business buyer through their own internal processes. And that's a craft that happens typically with a certain type of seller.

Right? Yeah, that's a great point. And just to put a specific number around that, I think what you were saying when we were prepping for the session, Andrea, was that you found that that cutoff point is actually about 400 employees, is that right?

Yeah. So we actually I. The team enterprise at Inside view is actually 400 employees. And so it goes 400 to 2,499. And we technically consider that mid market. And rather than having that sit closer to SMB, we found that at about 400 employees, the that buying complexity changes and it becomes much more like the very large organizations because the bigger that company is getting, they're starting to say, oh, we need to not just buy departmentally, we need to buy for the company. When you're at that level of buying for the company again, it gets a little bit more involved because there's vendor consolidation that goes on. And then when you get to the 2,500 mark, it's just, it becomes a little cray cray.

Yeah, yeah, that's the technical term. Cray cray. That's cra. Cra y. Go ahead.

It's also how you're going after that organization itself. I mean, ge, if you're going after a small section of GE that might not be an enterprise account, although they're an enterprise company obviously, whereas you can have a mid market account that you're trying to get the entire thing at the same time. Bring everybody, you need to get everybody involved and that becomes a enterprise deal, even though they may not necessarily be an enterprise account.

Yeah, good point. Another question for you, Andrea, and then we'll have you weigh in on this one too, Mark, because I think it would be helpful for the audience to get your perspective. What are a couple of key ways that you've seen enterprise selling evolve over those. About 20 years that you've been doing it.

20 plus years.

Sorry.

Definitely. So when I, when I started selling back in the not 2000s, it was definitely you go to your business buyer or your IT buyer and you just move. Procurement has definitely taken a seat at the table and I think in the industries where you're definitely focusing up market, the procurement department and vendor management gets very engaged now and they need a win. They need to be able to show back to their leadership within the organization. Whether they roll up into finance or it, it typically does go that way. They need to show that they got something out of that deal. And so that has definitely changed. And that's a norm right now is. I mean, I have this conversation with, with my teams all the time. You need to save something for procurement because if they don't feel like they've won, then they're going to try to hold your deal up and it's going to continue to delay.

It's A great point, great point. Saving something for procurement. Oh, yeah. Besides a kick in the shins.

Yes.

Mark, what about you?

So how has it changed?

Is that the. Yeah, yeah. What's one or two key ways that you've seen enterprise selling evolve?

I mean, I've seen it evolve more from the difference between selling into the small accounts into the larger enterprise accounts. You know, the process is much different. Navigating through the buying process. Right. As you think about these complex buying processes is you have to think about two or three main things. Right. The first is really getting a good understanding of what that buying process is and when. I mean that it's not just from a surface level, it's from a digging deeper example. I worked recently with one of my sales reps who had a meeting, had the presentation, did the demo, spoke to afterwards, came back and, and talked about how the meeting went. We talked about it, and the first thing I asked is, so what's the next steps? What's the timeline? And the sales rep said to me that they said that they want to move forward by the end of March and they just have to get approval by the cfo.

Well, great.

So what happens between now and getting approval from the cfo? Well, I don't know. So you have to really dig deep. How many times has this, how many times has this buyer, how many times this guy actually got an approval from the cfo? How many what have they made a purchase similar to what we're selling them right now? What happens after the CFO approves that? Is it, are they signing at that point or does it have to go in front of board approval? Because if it's going in front of board approval, that may not happen that often. And that's the, you know, the complex buying process. Getting through that is important to understand all of the steps that you need to. And then the second thing is being able to map out the different stakeholders. Right. It's important to understand within the organization which stakeholders are actually getting involved. I read somewhere recently that something like 25 people in a typical Fortune 500 company will touch the decision making process or the proposal for even just a $50,000 purchase. How do you get to know these people? Which ones are the economic buyers, which ones are the technical buyers, champions and coaches? And we can talk about that later, the difference between those things. But those are the things. And then lastly is my favorite tool that I use, and that's a navigate. That's a reverse timeline. We've all talked about reverse timelines before. When you understand and fully understand that sales process, the buying process, and you understand all the stakeholders to be able to reverse timeline it back from when they want to move forward to now and all the steps that are in between, that's an invaluable tool. One of the things that I've seen that's make people successful is when you take that and you actually get the buyer to agree on it and to approve all of the steps and you use it as a living document as opposed to just a document that you're going to look at and help yourself through that sales process.

And Shep, I think in that with the different constituents in that process, and by doing that reverse timeline, backing up from the date that is going to close. One of the dilemmas is that frequently the business buyer doesn't even know what their own buying process is. And so if you can actually help them lay it out and help them and coach them through their own internal processes and sometimes at the enterprise class level, you have to go and help them build that relationship with it and build that relationship with procurement. So if you actually do back into a deal and understand all the steps that can go on, you're sometimes educating that business buyer because they're not always doing a purchase like that. They're not always engaging with the CFO for that type of purchase.

And you get to learn if that, you know, if that is really something that's forecastable. Because if they've never done it before, you can have a lot less confidence that they'll be able to get it done this time.

Yeah, great points, Great points. I love that point about Mark focusing on the buying process, their buying process, as opposed to the selling process and the concept. I think for many of you in the audience, you might have a pretty new solution. Right. That maybe they can't pattern recognize. Right. They haven't bought something like what you're offering before. So that concept of helping them actually understand and navigate their own buying process is a really important point. I've got plenty more questions for the panel, but let me turn it to the audience and see if we have a couple of questions. I see a gentleman back there with some glasses. Go ahead. We got building a sense of urgency. Go ahead. You got to turn it on. This better be a really good question.

Yeah.

Yeah. Let me repeat the question for the benefit of the folks who didn't hear it. So the question was around building urgency. Right. We just heard Mark say that in a typical enterprise sale at a Fortune 1000 company, you might have 25 stakeholders involved. Right. How do you build urgency and momentum? Especially if you have a timeline, right. Like the end of quarter or end a year that might not mesh with the prospects timeline. So Mark, let me turn that one to you first for some thoughts and then Andrea will come to you. Great.

So that is one of the biggest challenges, right? It's, it's making sure that, that the buyer is, has the urgency that you have. Because the discount that you mentioned before, the, you know, the discount for moving forward by the end of the December, whatever that is, that's only going to work so well. It doesn't work so well at the higher levels, as you mentioned. So the most important things are, first of all, understanding the timeline from the beginning so that you can continually be going through that timeline with the customer. The second thing is figuring out what it is that what impact, what business impact that that customer is going to have going to have if they decide if they move forward on time and what negative impact they're going to have if they don't move forward on time. So it's about digging in, figuring out what that impact is, whether it's financial impact, productivity impact, whatever the case may be, and leveraging that in order to make sure that it moves forward in the timeline that you're looking to move forward. Because it's about them achieving their goals, not about a sales rep hitting their quota for the month or something along those lines.

Great. Thanks, Mark. Andrea?

Yeah. It's the proverbial how do you become a painkiller and not the vitamin? Right. The vitamin is optional. The painkiller has to handle something acute. And if you're not able to tie it back to the business value, then it frequently becomes optional. And then you're just a product looking, you're a hammer looking for a nail. And you have to get that buyer to understand what the storyline is. How do they become a hero in the storyline of going against business as usual and business as usual, when you're getting a customer to buy into the storyline and they're seeing themselves as that hero, they need to look at business as usual as the villain. Right. Because in every story there's a hero and a villain. And if they don't see themselves as solving that business problem and being the hero within their organization, it's optional. And you're a vitamin.

Yeah, that's a wonderful point. I love that sort of visual imagery of, of vitamin and painkiller. I think the one thing I would add would be make sure your reps are really, really frank and candid. And sort of have the rose colored glasses taken off. Because if there isn't a business impact and that prospect can't articulate a business impact because there is none, then you might be a vitamin and it's not a deal you should be counting on or banking on. Right. Because there isn't that hard ROI.

And in SaaS, it sometimes is okay and easy to take down revenue with momentum. But in SaaS, how do you keep that customer if they don't understand how to measure success? And I think that's the death knell for SaaS because that recurring revenue has to be tied to something of value. And I think we all get a little caught up in that Top line revenue. Top line revenue. But I don't know about you, but Inside View measures success on the lifetime value of that customer. And we don't always make it back in the first year, but we do make it back in subsequent years. But if you lose them after the first year, whoops. Right.

That's a great point. We've got a question over here. Go ahead.

Hello. How are you guys deploying account based marketing for your named accounts when you're going whale hunting after some of your biggest potential clients?

Great question, Andrea. I'll pass that one to you to start.

Absolutely. So those of you who don't know what Inside View does, we provide both data, insights and connections. So tying in account based marketing, tying it to something that's relevant to them versus making it all about you. And so if you're trying to pitch your product and pitch your product, but you're not tying it back to some intrinsic business value, you're going to continue to be that vitamin. So account based marketing is just very tailored for the specific customer that you're looking at. And if you can create watch lists or provide insights on that specific customer's business needs and tailor a campaign to them, then you're actually going to be able to be much more precision oriented. And you're not shotgunning messages out there, you're rifle shotting them. Sorry, I'm from Texas, so.

Yeah, Mark, anything you want to add.

On that, by the way? Mark, Sorry, if you have an example, I would love to hear how you guys have tried to deploy with a particular campaign.

So I've got a great example. Right. If you're a real estate broker and you're trying to sell them on mergers and acquisitions, you want a watch list that's going to tell you that they just bought a division and they're expanding an operation in a certain geography. Why don't you tailor a message and your product solution, Especially if you're going after some type of HR or, you know, people based solution. What a great opportunity to tailor and do an account based marketing campaign to that business driver, which is their business driver. It's not about your product and offering, it's about their need. Does that help?

Okay, good. We've got a question over here.

What's your sales rep profile for an enterprise sales rep?

That's a great question. I think we talked about traits, right? What's the profile or traits that you look for? Mark, we'll start with you.

Sure, yeah. So in all sales you look for a lot of the same types of traits like being able to ask a lot of questions, being curious, being intelligent, those sort of things. But when it gets to the enterprise, there's some more things that you have to really focus on. And that's the thing that sticks out to me is if you think about it from a quarterback perspective, right? It's about being able to not be a person that can just do everything and get through closing the business, but being able to corral all the necessary resources that you have internally within the organization and put the right people in front of the account at the right time. So that's a little bit of a difficult thing to look at. And that's why it's important when you structure the process and you go through the interview process to be able to test if they can do these types of things. But I think that would be something that stands out to me that's very different because, because I've seen great sales reps that have been able to present great, be able to negotiate great, be able to close business. But when it comes to closing large enterprise deals, if they haven't done a really good job of building internal relationships, if their first call to the head of security at their organization is that I need you on a call in an hour to help me close this business, you're not going to be able to to win a lot of fans and win a lot of business. So it's not scalable. That's one thing I would say stands out to me. That's different from in enterprise sales, from other things.

That's great insight, Mark. If your enterprise sales rep is like the quarterback, how important is the post game press conference? Just joking. That was a Cam Newton reference. Y' all stay with me here. Andrea, you had some great thoughts on this. Tell us about the trade.

For me, it's really three, three traits which definitely the athleticism Is one of them intellectual curiosity, right. Not just trying to answer the what, but to understand the why. So really working with a customer to get back down to what's. Let's tie this back to what is the customer's challenge and business needs. So that intellectual curiosity and you know, not just surface leveling the internal relationships, but really click, clicking down into how is the how are you going to help have people help you? The second one is resilience. Right? Grit. We all hear about grit these days. Enterprise selling, you hit a wall, you got to bounce off, shake it off and hit the next wall and bounce off and shake it off and learn and pivot and then the athleticism, right, the quarterback. You can lose a deal alone in enterprise, but you darn sure cannot win one alone. So you have to be able to get, you have to have a team player, you have to have the ability to be strong and nimble and pivot very quickly. So those traits, the really, the intellectual curiosity, the resiliency and then the ability to be an athlete.

That's great. Good. We have another question over here for early startups with just a founder team, so they don't have a marketing department.

An outbound sales team, what would be.

Your advice for those types of teams.

That are trying to close enterprise sales deals? 0 through 5, 1 and 2. From a tactical standpoint, has a bottoms up approach been a successful strategy or does a top down strategy for whale.

Hunting, Is that more effective? Thanks, Andrew. Do you want to start with that one?

Yeah. So your CEO has got to be able to get engaged and help you sell those first couple of deals. And again it is about team selling. So if you're not getting especially on that first zero to five big deals, they will make your company. And so everybody has to pivot together and really take down, put the ego outside the door, be willing to actually craft and hone in on the right presentation and again, just do not make it about you. You have to make it about that customer. And the more you can tailor and make again make them that hero. I know I overuse it, but if you make them that hero in that story and get your leadership and your resources to all understand the flow and create the arc of the story and again put them in the middle of that as a hero. But your CEO has to get out there and sell those first couple of deals, especially in startup mode.

Mark, go ahead.

I just wanted to hit on the top down versus bottom up. I've never seen anybody be that successful in an enterprise deal going bottom up. Along alone. It's just not going to work the way that. I mean, the best case scenario is if you can have somebody, an executive, a CEO or a seasoned sales rep that can go top down and then also have either an SDR or a more junior sales rep or even a sales engineer go top up, then they can meet somewhere in the middle. But going up top, bottom up is not a recipe for being able to close enterprise business.

It's not fast, that's for sure.

Good. We have a question closer to the stage here.

And then we've got one over there afterwards.

The question is about the priorities. When you're selling in and you have convinced the buyer and they have a lot of priorities, like you said, it gets involved and it's not in the list of the priority projects. Right. So it gets moved out, couple of months. What are the best practices there to keep that thing warm so that nothing else happens during that time? So your project gets thrown up. So encounter that a lot of times. So how to keep that thing warm, Mark?

You want to start with that one?

So is the question just, just so I understand the question, is it what, what can you do in that, in that few months in between where it hasn't been a priority and you're waiting for, for, you know, the deal to close deal, the deal to progress through, but there's nothing you could do right now and you're trying to figure out how to keep engaged.

Making it a priority.

Oh, in terms of making it a priority. Okay. I mean, it's going to go back to, you know, it's going to come back to what they're, what they're, what the impact of them not making a decision is right now. Right. And if you can really understand, if you can understand how they're going to be negatively affected by waiting a few months, for instance, if your solution is going to provide them with some financial gain every day, every month, every year that they're using your solution, you can then make the argument that the sooner that they move forward, the sooner they're going to be reaping the benefits and the reward of the gain they're going to be getting. I don't know if that really answers the question, but what I would say is in between that you should be working to figure out who else in the organization is involved and start building relationships with other people within the organization. Because too often you get to a point where you rely on the fact that something's going to happen in three or four months and changes happen within that organization. And very often you'll find four months from then it's going to happen four months, four months later or four months later.

So Andrew, I think there's some of it is when you know your total addressable market and you're doing a very active marketing campaign and you get that initial interest, but maybe it's just not now create a drumbeat, right? So stay on them as Mark referenced. Understand the different Personas that are in there and just tweak your messaging a bit in those drum beat touches touches to kind of keep the rhythm. Because at some point they're going to be sitting in a meeting, someone's going to complain about something, they're going to be like, wait a minute, wait a minute, someone just reminded me of that recently. And so that drumbeat is going to help them right? In the more. And it's, it's even subliminal, right? If they hear it and they hear it and it's said differently and it's said by someone else and they're in this meeting and they heard it together, then they're going to be like, oh my gosh, we do need to do that. Right? So it can actually convert that latent in interest into more of that pain. So I think a drumbeat and some of that tailored account based marketing where you're targeting their pain point, not your solution's ability to solve a problem. And that drumbeat is really, really important.

Yeah. The one thing I would add to that because I think that's a really profound question. Right. Couple of quick thoughts. One is Jill Rowley, who I think many of you are probably familiar with, has a great expression similar to that idea of a drumbeat. And she talks about creating the water cooler conversation, right? And the way you create the water cooler conversation, that's when a couple of stakeholders that are involved in that enterprise purchase decision run into each other in the break room, grabbing a cup of coffee and your company comes up because what you've been doing is you've been feeding great content marketing, right? Really relevant content to all of those people. So you actually become the topic of conversation around the water cooler and they go, yeah, why did that project stall? Didn't we hand that down to procurement, Right? So that water cooler drumbeat thought is really, really powerful. And the other suggestion that I would have is get your enterprise reps used to asking what the other priorities are that can derail your project. Okay. Salespeople hate asking the questions they don't want to hear the answer to. Right? Nobody wants to ask, hey, what could get in the way because they're afraid somebody could be like, well, I got XYZ right? And they don't want to hear that because they feel like they have a deal. Ask. You have to know what those other priorities are. What's on their calendar coming up that could derail your sale. We had a question over here. This gentleman's been waiting for a while.

Thank you for that.

So after some starts and stops, my enterprise team came online in a very.

Meaningful way in 2015 with multiple seven figure transactions and the like.

One of those deals, one of those million dollar deals happened entirely by the telephone, not one in person visit. Is it a trend or a one off?

Who wants to take that one?

I think it's a one off. I think the million dollar deals are, a lot of them are based on relationship. You clearly had some awesome momentum on that deal. I've not seen it become a tre trend yet. There's definitely more. I mean our buyers are definitely doing, I mean we've all seen the, you know, the CEB statistics and the Forrester stats. They're you know, over 50 down the buying process before they even come to us. So you can capture that momentum. If you can keep things moving and they've got that pain and you're, you've got that painkiller, you can certainly move a deal very fast. I, I just don't know that it's a trend, but I, I would love to be proven wrong because I'm waiting for that to happen.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's just the level, I mean, seven figure deals, I don't think that's a consistent trend that you can close that over the phone. But I think there is a number somewhere that's in that half million dollar range, 300, 400,000, that you can consistently close business over the phone.

There's one over here.

Go ahead. Thanks. Yeah, you guys, you both started by mentioning that you had built channels and worked a lot with partners. At what stage would you recommend a lot of these companies start actually reaching out to partners to start building their own channel organization to help them, you know, start going into some of these larger customers who they already have relationships with. Andrea, you want to.

So from an inside view perspective, we, we definitely went direct first and we had a lot of momentum in our direct business. But we realized very quickly if we were going to get to 100 million and 100 million really quick, we needed to pivot into the channel space and getting other people speaking for us and on behalf of us and you know, with, with market intelligence and you know we're woven into the CRMs and the marketing automation solutions, allowing those partners that do those implementations and do the BPO associated with changing a sales organization or in, you know, doing a BI project or master data management that getting them to put the skin in the game to have better data was critical. And so we definitely went pretty aggressively down the channel. I have a whole sales team that just sells through two or three business partners and it's great. Our win rate on the referral business is fantastic. And if I just want more. Right. So channel is really critical because it casts a bigger shadow for you.

For us at Greenhouse, we're just starting to go through that process. We haven't developed a full, full blown channel program yet. We obviously have some really great partners that we work with to, to refer each other business but from a channel perspective we have not gone down that path yet.

Yeah, when you do go down that path though, make sure resilience is key for your reps there because partners can be very frustrating because they have their own agenda and they have their own timeline for skilling and enablement. But the resilience is just don't give up on it because if you can get it functioning it's really, really worth it.

Great advice. Do we have a question over here? Go ahead. What best practices do you have for onboarding enterprise sales reps, Mark, you want to start with that one.

Best practices for onboarding.

For onboarding sales reps. Well, there's a couple of them. First, you have to make sure that you have a really good cadence and place for what that sales reps going to have to go through. And you need to work through that in the beginning and let them know exactly what the expectations are going to be. You have to be able to bring in the right people within your organization to train them on all the aspects of not only how to sell within the organization but also the product pricing, all of the things that are important. Just from a best practices perspective, I think it's just about making sure that you have a really good coaching culture within the organization. So it's not just the actual onboarding, the specific onboarding, but that there's constantly reminders and work coming from managers or other folks on the team that can work with them and share the best practices and make that a consistent cadence that happens on, not ad hoc, but actually on at least a weekly basis.

Yeah, so we have a sales enablement resource that really helps because it provides the baseline structure in enterprise. It's a little different because it's not a transactional business. So learning the quoting tool and futzing around with all the salesforce levers that we work with and learning how to read the marketo triggers. So I actually create an onboarding partner with another enterprise rep because, because I'm also trying to foster a team selling environment and if they have a peer to go to to ask the dumb questions that maybe I've already coached them or one of my managers has coached them on, they're not as embarrassed to ask the silly questions and they have a peer that they can go to and you will also find that that peer wants them to be successful. So they'll actually go out of their way to take a little bit of the burden off of either one of my sales directors or even myself if it's one of my global, global folks. And so that onboarding partner really is invaluable. And it's, we do it quite informally. It's just. And I even set it up with, you're not their manager. Right. Just let invite them to your calls, maybe let them tag along to a meeting or two and just be available to answer the questions that maybe we taught them. Right. In that cadence and in that rhythm with those expectations. But again they don't do it enough that it's, it's inherent until they've actually tried it a couple of times. Right.

I think that's great insight. The one thing I might add would be that I would encourage you to think about onboarding especially of an enterprise rep as a whole company thing.

Yes.

Like it's not you alone. You need to get your product, your marketing, your finance people involved to help and contribute and they should be willing to help. But it really is a whole company exercise. This is a very serious and investment that you're making in a really highly trained and highly paid hopefully assassin. So it's a whole company thing. I know we have a question over here, but I think we had one waiting. We'll come back to you in a moment. Go ahead.

All right, thanks. Two quick questions. So for a startup who's selling into enterprise, what's the best practice or what's a way to get an attention of the decision maker or buyer? Because sometimes just getting to that decision maker is extremely hard because you know, they get bombarded with a lot of messages and emails and at what point, you know, if you are focusing on these account based marketing and you have top 50 accounts you're going after you give up on them saying okay, you know, let's just give up and move on.

Great questions. Andrea, do you want to start off? Yeah.

So first, don't go to them with you, right? Go to them for them. And if you can be tailored in the way that you're approaching them with something that's personal, personalized to them, then you're not making it about you, you're making it about them. And I think that is a really tactical mistake that a lot of startups make is that they think their product is so awesome that of course people are just going to line up to buy it. But you have to, you have to make sure that you are using an insight that's specific to their business. Pain point. And frankly, we all networked, we're all selling, we're all building products. Tap into your network, right? So use your personal connections and if you can get a person who is closer to them than you are to actually reference you in. We all know that references are better than just data and something that's specific about them. A personal connection is really important. So I think when you're in startup mode, that is just vital.

Mark, anything?

Yeah, no, I think what Andrew said, one point that she hit on I thought was really, really valuable. And that's especially when you actually get to the person having a really good understanding of what your value prop is to that particular person. Because if you start to just speak to people about the different features and things that make you a little bit different, that's not something that's important to the decision maker. They're looking to understand exactly what your value proposition is, what you are bringing to the table as an organization. What the, you know, what is value? It's obviously it's benefits minus the cost. So figuring out not only you know, why, how you're going to help them with specific features, but what is the value for them that you're going to bring and what is that actual, you know, quantifiable number or what is that quantifiable thing and what is the opportunity cost for them not to be moving forward with something like, like your solution?

I think those are some powerful answers. One, one thought I might add, and not to quibble with your question, but I think the way you phrased the question was how do you get the attention of the decision maker? Okay. And I personally, I hate the word decision maker and I hate the word gatekeeper. Right. Because if you think about it, and I actually tried this exercise with my team just yesterday. I asked the members of my team, am I a decision maker or A gatekeeper. Right. And they all sort of dutifully said, you're a decision maker. And I said, what if I'm calling from Silicon Valley bank and I want to present some funding options to Keith and Chris, our CEO and cfo. Am I a decision maker or a gatekeeper? Right. And they're sort of polite. So they were like decision maker. I'm a gatekeeper at that point. Right. Those words make me cringe and I cringe when somebody says, oh well, who's the decision maker on this? I think the point that Andrea and Mark made early on, you know, the way the world has changed, there isn't really a decision maker anymore. We really are dealing in a consensus sale world.

Especially enterprise.

Especially enterprise. The gang that wrote Challenger Sale put out an article recently in Harvard Business Review called the Consensus Sale. It's a really good read, really worthwhile. It might help you rethink that approach. There might not just be one person who's a. You need to get right. We had a question over here and then we'll come back this way.

Hello. Thank you. Can you hear me quite clearly?

Yes, we can.

So two quick questions. One is we clearly learned and it's clear that the closing activities for an enterprise and for the mid market are very, very different. But what about the lead generation activities? Like in terms of do you see the typical outbound campaigns working on the enterprise customers as well or would you go a different route? And my second question is regarding the sales enterprise salespeople, how it's a very long sales cycle and obviously it's difficult like you can't know whether the deal will close or not. But especially for the early startups, at what point do you know how to evaluate your enterprise sales rep based on kind of like the deals are moving but they're not closing yet and how long do you give them and how do you really decide at the which point to. To make the decision?

Okay, thank you. Just to recap, so two part question. One is how do you handle lead gen in the enterprise? Is it different from SMB or general business? And then the other is if it's a long sales cycle and you have an enterprise rep who seems to be doing well in building pipeline but hasn't closed anything yet, when do you know when it's time to cut bait? Right.

Or.

Or let them keep fishing. I'll turn it to you all, have one of you answer one part and one answer the other.

Your choice.

Yeah. So I would say so I'll take the last one first. Going Back to the question that was earlier on. You know, do you start top down and how do you start for the first couple of deals? If your leadership team has participated in some of those early deals, getting them back engaged. Because remember, you can't win it all by yourself. So you're going to probably need the help of your leadership and, you know, product organizations and whatnot. If you're nervous about that and they're not getting those closes, participate in those cycles. Again, just get engaged, ask to be invited. And again, I don't know how many of you have seen this in your sales careers, but I certainly have executives want to get involved in the last week of the quarter. Well, get them involved earlier in the quarter so that it doesn't look as desperate as it actually feels. And there's a justification of I want to prove myself. So if you get involved sooner, you're going to start to realize that they're not, you know, they're afraid of asking about the buying process or they're not. They're not proud of their craft and they're trying to hide the fact that they're selling. I mean, there should be. I mean, I'm very proud that I'm in sales. I love my craft and the fact that I sometimes have people on my team that are like, soft footing around, asking for the business. If you're not comfortable asking the customer, what's it going to take to make this deal happen? And then you're just dancing around the topic all the time. So you'll know a little bit of that. And if you get back engaged, I think you'll start to figure out if they're cutting the mustard or not.

I'm just going to add to that part of the question that you asked. For me. It's also, it's not necessarily whether you know how long the deal has been in the pipeline. If you actually can look at a buying process and align your sales process to what the buyer's needs are and have verifiable exit criteria. And Aaron Malamed, one of the directors on my team, worked with me to come up with some really great exit criteria to make sure that our reps, as we go through the sales process, we know that the deal is moving as we expect it to, and I would mention measure it based off of the velocity that it's actually going through the process as opposed to whether you actually close the business. I know that's hard to do, but at least if you have those verifiable exit criteria, you'll have the Ability to, you'll be able to measure how that rep is taking the enterprise deal through the process. And then I think we missed the first.

Yeah. So the lead gen. I have very strong opinions about sales development or lead generation. I find it, it's just not a transactional effort like a transactional business isn't more of a small business, faster paced deal. These are long plays and if you're gonna round robin the leads that come in and your reps, let's be honest, enterprise sales reps are control freaks, right? And you want them to be, and they're impatient and you want them to be. So if you're bouncing SDRs into that relationship and there's not a conf continuity point where they can trust and hand off and you know, again, how many deals get deeper into the sales cycle and then stall. Do you want your enterprise rep taking their time away to be calling and stalking and checking in and you know, and you know John Barrows has that famous did I lose you tagline on an email. If they're, do you want them doing that or would you rather your SDR to do that? So handing it back into their SDR or their handful of SDR is really important. So I believe that separating small business from enterprise sales development is vital and I think the continuity and the long term relationships. When you land a deal, and a lot of enterprise deal is a land and expand approach. When you land a deal, why not put your SDR back into that deal? Because they had developed a relationship, get referred into another line of business but they've developed that rapport, they understand the account, they know the rep and so it just creates a selling team versus an SDR that's going after creating an opportunity. But that's my opinion.

Great, I think that's well put. We've got a question in the back, this gentleman here, then we'll come back to you.

What do you think about IFI's IFP score coming out of the blue? What should startups do with things like that? There's a lot of effort involved in answering to them and the chances are maybe pretty low. So rule of thumb, we heard this RFP which you don't have contributed to previously is a lost RFP more or less.

So the question was RFPs. An RFP comes in out of the blue, should you respond or not? Mark, you want to start with that one?

Yeah, I mean it depends. I'll give it. It depends. It depends at what, what stage you're talking about. Obviously if, if you're, you don't have a ton to do, then yeah, that's a. That's a great, great thing to try to. To bring on a customer. Right now, the way we look at it, if an RFP has come on but we haven't done a good enough job yet of qualifying that customer, we're gonna. We're gonna respond to these rfp, but it's going to be a very generic response done by a sales engineer in our organization. But if they've taken the time to qualify, if they'll get on the phone with us and speak to us about their needs and their challenges and we see that as someone that is a really. A potential fit for us. Yeah, we're going to put the time in to make sure that we respond the right way to be able to give thoughtful answers and be able to put ourselves in the best position to potentially win the business.

Yeah, for us, it does depend, Mark. We've stratified our organization with named accounts and then general territory. If it's in general territory, I think I sense that we're column fodder. I don't waste my reps time on that. I think that's just. I don't want to be column fodder. I'm too. Our team is too proud for that. And frankly, our time is too valuable. If it's a named account, yeah, I'm definitely more inclined to participate. But I definitely ask for that meeting, as Mark referenced to, to help re qualify some of the buying decisions. Right. What are some of the priorities? And if you can get that discussion in a named account or a targeted account and change at least a portion of the criteria to make it tied to your differentiators, I think it's worth it. If it's cold and it's a general territory, I feel like you're just column fodder. Right. I really believe that and I've not really regretted it because it's coming late and we're a bit of an afterthought.

Yeah, yeah. Great answers. If you're looking for a book that covers that subject in some depth, there's a great one out there called let's Get Real or let's not Play, and it talks about handling that exact question. I think we had a question over here. Go ahead. Yeah, I got a question coming back to the consensus sale and the importance of the enterprise to have an internal sponsor or champion. Interested to understand from Andrea or Mark any methods or tools that you've used to enable a champion to sell internally to other stakeholders. I'll take it.

First of all, I had mentioned earlier that they're, you know, one of the, one of the big mistakes I think that that reps make in the process or anybody makes in the process is relying on the wrong person and thinking that you're, they're your champion, when in fact they're not. They might be your coach. And there's, there's a big difference between a coach and a champion. And there's a lot of similarities, a lot of qualities that are the same. They're going to help you to navigate through the process, they're going to be an advocate for you. But the big difference is whether they have access to authority, whether they can either get you in front of the decision maker or they have the political clout within the organization to be able to really influence that decision with the decision maker. Once you know that that is the right person and the champion, then it's just building that relationship, working with that person kind of constantly making sure they're armed with all the things that are necessary for them to sell internally. And anything that you would be selling, you want them to be able to talk about your value proposition as well as you could if they're going to be successful, and also making sure that when you're looking at that champion that they have some kind of something that they're going to gain from moving forward with your solutions.

Personally, yeah, we're, we're a challenger shop. So we definitely look for that mobilizer. Right. If any of you follow the challenger and that we, we will actually become that mobilizer's assistant and we will help them build their internal materials to go and do the presentations. Again. Our, that whole a little servant leadership type of thing and the philosophy of making them be the hero. You know, we, we've got some nice technical practice prowess when it comes to PowerPoints and presentations and proposals. Why not leverage that to their advantage? Because it's really to our advantage. So we definitely try to make the mobilizer the successful entity. And even if they're not the decision maker, they're definitely pushing things within the company and they're being heard because they are the mobilizer. And so that's our approach.

Great. Good insight. I think we have time for two more questions. Let's take these two right here. We can hear you. I'll repeat it, Just to clarify. So you are VP of Enterprise sales. You came from IBM, Cisco, that big company world. You're working with a CEO who is new to enterprise sales and has never done enterprise Sales before enterprise solutions. Enterprise solutions. Okay, good luck. Next question. Just kidding. Andrea, do you want to start with that one?

Yeah. I mean, you know, especially first time CEO, right? There's probably a little optimism and definitely happy years that goes on. So I think a lot of coaching a lot, especially with your enterprise background and big company, you know, in the bigger companies is, you know, having worked at IBM many years of my career, it's a miracle anything got done. But, and I was, I was told many times you're exactly what we need at IBM. But man, you scare the crap out of me because I like to break glass. So you have to be, you cannot be afraid to break glass with your cell and every leader. I have this conversation with my reps all the time. Don't assume that they know what they're doing and we can't. Right? And so help coach and guide them so that again so they can look like they know what they're doing and then they'll start learning. Right. So it's harder for you and you're going to have to do a lot of their work but give them a role. Don't just hand the presentation to them. That is, I've seen it done over and over again. I'm going to bring my CEO in, I'm going to bring my CFO in and they're just going to do what they do well. They don't know what you want them to do. So be prescriptive, right? Tell them what you want their role to be and even coach them. If the conversation goes this way, pivot this way, right? Lay out the roadmap for them and I think then that first time CEO will appreciate and want to be more involved and will actually learn how to shut up because that's very important. Sometimes we got to get people to just shut up.

Right. Mark, I know your CEOs in the room somewhere. So does that mean you want to answer the question or he didn't want.

To hear the answer.

Do you want to weigh in?

No. That was exactly what I said as well.

Perfect. One other thought that I'll give you in that scenario. So I was in a sort of similar scenario. It was a second time CEO. Transparency and visibility is critical. Right. This is probably a pretty smart analytical guy, right? Give him visibility for us. We actually co located so we were all sitting in one room and he could see the activity. Right. We gave him access to Salesforce right away. Right. So don't try to hide or operate over here and say stay out of my way. Actually bring him in and let him see all of those things that are happening. And I think that will help as well. We have time for one last question right here.

Hi, I just have a quick question regarding the tools and strategies you guys have implemented to help shorten that enterprise sales cycle. We all know, you know, depending on like I think you mentioned, enterprise for Andrea is, you know, 400 to 2,500 employees end up. What have you guys used, you know, with your sales teams to help reduce that very long sales cycle?

Great tools and strategies to reduce the sales cycle.

Yeah.

So of course.

Sorry, go ahead.

No, go ahead. You're talking, please.

Well, we use inside view. Of course we do, because it's our own technology and we sell to sales and marketing. And so that actually allows us to be very precision oriented on focusing on the data, the insights and the connections. The connections is really vital. We're a salesforce marketo shop and we find those. It's a lot of it is how you enforce the usage of those things. And I even had a conversation with my leadership team because we're implementing an executive sponsorship program right now for especially on the. It's all on the enterprise side and our executives are the worst at putting their activity in Salesforce. So I'm going to do a little coaching session for them. And so a lot of it is the tools that you choose. It's how you actually create a cadence around the use of those and best practices because you can spend a whole lot of money on technology, but if you're not actually helping people understand how to use it and the purpose of using it, it's not just for me to look at activity for my reps. It's actually for handoffs and transitioning from sales into the customer success organization and bringing other people in. And then same thing with Marketo. Interesting moments, right? That's awesome. We didn't used to expose that to our salesforce. We now do do those types of things. So I think, you know, the tools, you know, it's a lot about how you implement them and kind of enforce that.

Mark, anything to add?

We use a bunch of different tools. We're using Insight squared a lot to help us to work with the reps to make sure that we're getting through the process in an efficient manner, but. But also making sure that they're hitting all of the things that they need to hit in each of those steps. I would say the biggest tool. And it's not a solution. It's what I said before. It's a reverse timeline. It's making sure that document is used properly, coaching reps on how to use it, understanding all the steps that need to go from now through even the next step to the next step until they want to be up and running, running. And like I said earlier, it's making sure that the buyer, the customer is on board with what you think those things are. Confirm that stuff, make sure that they are, they agree with all the things and keep it as a living document. Work with them every time you're speaking to them. Just see where you are in the process and that way you'll have a much better chance of navigating with them more quickly through the process.

Sounds like we have time for one. One more question. So is there one more question out there? You go ahead. If you didn't get your question answered, we will be hanging out. Come find us. So please feel free. Track us down. Go ahead.

This kind of goes back to the tools you were talking about. Presentations are critical to the sales cycle. Is there any tools or secrets that you use to keep everyone singing off the same sheet of music or ensuring that your slides and and what you're using are all up to date? If you have 80 people, they're not making disparate messages out there based off some presentation six months ago. Any tools, any presentation management.

We store things in box and we reference it through Chatter and Salesforce. So we don't link, we don't store documents in Salesforce because that becomes heavy, but we link them to that within the chatter with the documents into box and it helps navigate. Salespeople are again impatient and a little add. So having them source through box is sometimes overwhelming for them. We're actually right now considering content management, so it's another mechanism to make it tied into our sales process and just allowing it to link into the source document. But we're big advocates of box because sharing, pushing PowerPoints around version control and logos that should and shouldn't be used is it can get you in a little bit of hot water.

We do similar thing.

Yeah. One thing I might add is, you know, for us, some deviation from the norm is okay. You know, so for us, we want to have core messages the same. We want to have some version control over the PowerPoints that are out there, but actually an enterprise rep putting their own spin on it and adapting it for the particular situation there. Spacing is just fine. Okay. With that, we'll wrap the session up. Thank you all very much for your time. Andrea, Mark, thank you so much.

Great questions, guys. That's awesome.