Get answers from sales leaders
Roee Zelcer
TikTok Head of Sales, Products & Services • February 10
This is a very important question and one that not everyone will see eye to eye with me on this. But personally, it has never failed me up until now. There are a few elements that are common to candidates that have been proven to be successful: The first is tenacity. It is that inner hunger to learn new topics or master new skill sets. One who always finds ways to be proactive and push boundaries. When talking to candidates, I always look for a potential team member whom I will need to restrain rather than one I will need to nudge forward. The second is communication skills. A great seller is someone who you talk to and immediately comes off as connectable and relatable. Someone who has a clear understanding of the person in front of them. The third aspect would have to be very strong social and emotional intelligence. This goes hand in hand with having a client first mentality. A great candidate is one who will give the client the true sense that he puts their interest above anything. Earning that trust is key to building a long-term, healthy relationship.
...Read More4745 Views
Upcoming AMAs
Andrew Zinger
Fastly Senior Director, Global Sales Enablement • January 11
Ah.. a great question and something that I have yet to see perfected, but continues to get easier as many enablement and development professionals know and argue that companies cannot afford NOT to invest in the soft skills development of their employees. Historically I have seen that budgets typically allocated towards soft skills learning initiatives are all too often the first to be cut because of the difficulty of proving an ROI of sales soft skills versus hard/technical skills. Below are a couple of approaches I have seen, taken and partnered with internal teams around indicators of success within soft skill initiatives: Platform Engagement Rates: One area of my business I look to when measuring the impact of 'soft skill' enablement is our internal LMS & CMS platforms that tracks learners’ usage, knowledge retention and engagement rates. If a platform or specific collection of content is being used and consumed on a regular basis, it is a sign that employees are getting value from the company's soft skills training. If engagement and consumption levels are lacking, it could be a sign that the platform is not easy to navigate, that the content is untrusted or not engaging. Track Sales Team Productivity Rates: Over time I have started to see the increase in how soft skills such as multitasking, proactivity, communication, and creative-thinking have had a positive impact on sales productivity rates at companies that prioritizes employee development. Identifying and tracking success metrics across the sales team upon implementing soft skills initiatives is a great way to measure program impact. Sales Team Retention: Sales team churn is a major cost to any organization, and something that is easily measurable and can tell an important story. A recent 'Workplace Learning' report out of LinkedIn suggests that 94% of employees consider staying longer with companies who invest in programs aimed at career development. Impact of Process Optimisation: When organizations and teams see soft skills like successful teamwork, great communication, and strong time-management become ingrained in a company's culture, processes are optimised, and sales motions are completed more effectively and efficiently. Looking at the time it takes sales opportunities through the full deal cycle is a useful way to present an ROI to the business.
...Read More2632 Views
Nick Feeney
Loom VP, Revenue • March 10
Moving up-market is no easy task. It adds a great deal of complexity, precision, and requires more people, processes, workflows, and technologies to do it effectively. This initiative must be done company wide and has to address the ongoing challenges that your target (or evolving/new target) audience must solve at a global scale. Here are a few things you’ll need to think about as you shift from a velocity to a transformation motion: 1. Historical success 1. Have you closed up market in the past? 1. Can you create a playbook around these successes? 2. What deals have we lost up market? Can we take learnings from these losses in order to adjust our sales motion, product, security, legal, etc. in order to win? 2. Product 1. Are you solving an enterprise need? 2. Are you sustainable for an enterprise wide deployment? Have you done this in the past? 3. Integrations and workflows 4. How do you differentiate in the competitive market? 3. Security 1. Configuration and posture management 2. Architecture 3. Monitoring and threat protection 4. Automated workflows 5. DevSecOps 1. SSO, SAML, authentication flows 6. Governance and risk compliance 7. System functionality and APIs 4. Marketing and Sales alignment 1. Target audience 1. Does this change as you go up market? 2. Target account list 1. Firmographic + technographic data 3. Segmentation 2. ABM (account based marketing) 3. Lean on your investors for support and guidance 4. Do you have the technologies to support this transition at scale? 5. Customer support 1. What are the needs of your current Enterprise customers? 1. How will you scale in order to support more? 6. Revenue streams 1. Top down - ICP, key targeted accounts, ABM/pure outbound 2. PLG - Free, bottoms up, pilot + PoC process 3. Community Led - Empower people to become an extension of your brand, product feedback, customer advocacy, resellers, consultants (creating additional revenue streams)
...Read More781 Views
Marleyna Mohler
Attentive Sr. Director of Inside Sales • May 17
Staying up to date: It’s important to pick a medium that you like for content. Whether it is Linkedin, podcasts, email newsletter, or chat based slack groups, you want to make sure you are setting yourself up for success. If the content goes unread or unlistened to, you won’t build a consistent learning habit. Personally, I find the most value in content forums where you can engage and ask follow up questions, hear multiple opinions on a particular matter, and even reach out the the original writer for a 1-1 chat! Another underutilized source of knowledge for industry trends is content from Sales Development technology vendors. It’s imperative that they stay on the cutting edge, so following a few top vendors on Linkedin will allow you to see what future the tools are preparing for. Avoiding the noise: There can be a great amount of value in public best practices. That said, there is risk in assuming that something that works for someone else will also work for you, or for implementing changes to something when you are already seeing above-average results. For example, if your content is getting a 20% reply rate, you may not want to adopt the “best practice” that moved someone else's team from a 10% to 15% reply rate. Having your own benchmarks and running your own A/B tests can help you determine where you should be altering your SDR motion, and where you should keep yours in place. Then, you can proactively search for interesting ideas to test in areas you are performing below benchmark.
...Read More1206 Views
Brandon Love
Salesforce Regional Sales Director • October 12
Navigating tactical opportunities within our enterprise accounts is a challenging but vital aspect of my role. My team focuses on deals that align with our clients' strategic objectives. On average, each AE handles 3 to 5 opportunities per month. While many of the key stakeholders remain consistent (sponsor, procurement, key decision maker), the diverse nature of our products means managing these deals can be intricate and time-intensive. Understanding each product and its customer-centric benefits is crucial. This insight allows us to align and prioritize opportunities effectively. Once consensus is reached, establishing a mutual close plan with specific steps and responsible parties becomes much smoother. When execution is spot-on, and the product's benefits are acknowledged, quantified, and a timeline is set, the rest of the sales cycle shifts towards project management and ensuring accountability, rather than traditional selling. This approach ensures that our efforts are laser-focused on delivering value and driving outcomes for our clients in line with their strategic vision.
...Read More1393 Views
Beau Noonan
Matterport Enterprise Sales Director • June 8
Here are a few good OKRs that I focus on within my region: * Objective: Increase Revenue Growth * Result: Increase sales stage conversation rate by x % * Result: Increase average deal size by x % * Objective: Enhance Customer Retention & Satisfaction * Result: Increase net dollar retention rate for existing enterprise clients * Result: Generate a certain percentage of revenue from upselling and expanding customers. * Objective: Optimize Sales Process & Efficiency * Result: Decrease sales cycle duration by x % * Result: Improve win rate of inbound qualified leads * Result: Implement a new tool such as CI to improve productivity
...Read More848 Views
Alicia Lewis
Culture Amp Senior Sales Director • April 25
There's a few different ways to gauge a candidate's autonomy in a sales interview. 1. Behavioral Questions: Ask situational questions that require candidates to describe times where they had to work independently to achieve sales targets or overcome challenges. For example one of my go to questions is, "What's the most creative, out of the ordinary, or above and beyond thing you’ve done to win a customer?" 2. Past Experience: Review the candidate's resume and ask about specific examples where they demonstrated autonomy in previous sales roles. Inquire about their sales process, strategies they implemented independently, and decisions they made autonomously. 3. Problem-solving Scenarios: Present examples of current sales scenarios and ask how the candidate would approach them. Evaluate whether they demonstrate the ability to think critically and make decisions independently in real life situations that arise. 4. Role-play Exercises: Conduct role-playing exercises where the candidate must handle a sales scenario independently. We ask candidates to run a discovery call and give them basic information on the team. Observe how they handle the situation and objections without much assistance or input.
...Read More530 Views
Brian Tino
AlphaSense Director of Strategic Sales, EMEA • June 30
One of the most important ways to help you stand out during a sales interview is to come into that interview well researched & prepared on the following: * The company & product * The interviewer * Your personal narrative * Relevant questions 1) Researching the company & product - be clear you understand what the company stands for, how they make money, and what value they deliver to clients (and be able to articulate it). You can usually do this by: * Reviewing the company website (especially blog posts, customer stories, and case studies) * Researching the company missions, vision, and values (usually in an "About Us" section) * Look at their social presence on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, etc. what are they posting about? * And if they have a free or trial version of the product, sign up for it & use it yourself 2) Researching the interviewer - get a feel for the interviewer's career path, their role & experience at the company, and what they personally care about. You can do this by: * Reviewing their LinkedIn profile to see prior work history & history with the current company * Check out social media Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn to see what they are posting about, and if they have written any blog post or articles themselves * See if you have any mutual connections and if you can do some back-channeling ahead of time 3) Preparing your personal narrative - make sure you have your professional story, what you want in your next role/company, and why you think you'd be the right fit for this specific role/company nailed: * Be able to tell the story of your professional journey, why you made the changes you made, and your track record of success along the way * Speak with conviction about your own personal values and what you are looking for in the next role/company (it's important there is mutual fit) * After reviewing the company, job description, and expectations, be able to speak to why do you think you are the right fit and what you can uniquely bring to the position 4) Preparing relevant questions - as an interviewer, I often get more from the questions a candidate asks because it can often provide insight into their own research & preparation, values, curiosity, and interest in the role/company: * Prioritize your questions based on what is most important to you (you'll likely only be able to get to a few of your questions in the first interview, so make them count) * Ensure the questions are relevant to that specific individual (executives will have a unique perspective on the company strategy & future, while potential peers & cross-functional partners can share more about the day-to-day and company culture) * And NEVER say you don't have any more questions (as this signals you are not well researched enough, aren't curious, and/or don't care about the role/position) Finally, as a BONUS TIP - always "close" on a sales interview by understanding definitive next steps and if the interviewer has any concerns or hesitations following your conversation
...Read More571 Views
I don't have a favorite question but I do prefer open ended questions in discovery. Close ended questions start with helper verbs. Every question beginning with these words(Am, Are, Is, Was, Were) can be answered by a buyer with a yes or a no. Even when folks give you more than a yes or no they will always be giving you less than a response to an open ended question. To get the most information and provoke deep thought from a prospect. I coach my team to leverage open and command open questions. For example questions that start with Who, What, Where, Why, Tell Me, Explain, Describe, Help me understand ETC. When you construct questions that are "open ended" buyers will elaborate and provide answers with a lot of detail.
...Read More1567 Views
Charles Gryor Derupe
accessiBe Director of Enablement • February 8
I very much understand how this is difficult, especially if you have a distributed workforce and if budget constraints don't give you the ability to get folks into one place. I'll share a common approach that my peers from across the industry use (since I focus mostly on content) that can help set this up for success: * When: Try trying these real-world experience workshops during times when you do have some sort of gathering. Perhaps that's SKO or a bi-annual regional meetup. Work with leads to ensure this is expected programming when they gather in a centralized office. * How: Identify how some key skills (whether this is discovery, negotiation, driving urgency) and teach on strategies and frameworks. Then identify some moments in non-work environments when we use these. For example, when you do discovery, can you challenge them to approach an acquaintance, or even stranger, and give them the 3x Question exercise? * Next Steps: Follow up with their reflections and experiences in another session or post-session reinforcement training. Whether that's a module they can add their experience to, or gather some of the real-life scenarios straight from them and do a follow-up async training that would challenge other team members to try that 3x questions. You can even roll these out with managers with facilitation guides and do some kind of improv exercise session for their teams. Really, at the end of the day, you need them to practice with a framework in a controlled environment, take it out in an uncontrolled environment, and reinforce in a controlled environment.
...Read More1174 Views