Sales Assembly’s Sales Souffle is a monthly collection of tips, trends, and tactics to help you navigate the Michelin Starred world of Tech Sales – featuring yours truly, Chef Matt Green, Chief Revenue Officer here at Sales Assembly.

Bon Appetit!

The concept of personalization in our outreach has been hammered home time and time again in our ecosystem, and rightfully so.  Lost, however, in the midst of all the talk around personalization as it relates to the prospect we’re reaching out to, is enough focus on personalization as it relates to the company we’re reaching out to.  How do you approach your customers based on what they are going through, rather than approaching customers based on your sales process, your fiscal quarters, and what you are going through?

One of the many personalization tools in your arsenal should be understanding how to speak to your customers based on their fiscal year.  Below are a series of questions that you absolutely should be able to answer about the company you’re trying to sell into:

    1. When do they budget?
    2. When do they buy?
    3. When is their fiscal year?
    4. Are you trying to sell to them outside of their timeline?
    5. What does the prospect care most about during the time that you’re talking to them (based on their fiscal year)?

FYI – for many companies, numbers 1, 2, and 3 are completely different time periods.  One of the biggest missteps a rep can make is to talk to a prospect as though all 3 are happening at once.

If you’re a rep, it’s imperative that you find out the answer to these questions as early on in the sales process as possible.  Be a dear and also log this information into your CRM.  If fields for numbers 1-3 don’t exist, holla at whoever has admin capabilities and get these added ASAP.

There’s a significant shift towards companies taking a product-led growth approach while also an increased focus on driving expansion revenue from existing customers.  Correlated is a tool that recently came out of stealth (fueled by a $9M Series A) that leverages some really cool looking analytics to give sales reps a heads up when it’s time for them to engage with self-service customers, highlight expansion opportunities within existing customers based on how they’re using your product, and help a rep prioritize who to reach out to and at what time.  Definitely a platform worth exploring!

Speaking of things worth exploring, in last month’s Sales Souffle, I highlighted the little-known fact that Vidyard offered a complimentary video selling masterclass to the public.  Well, the powers that be at Vidyard loved the influx of folks looking to uplevel their video selling game and now want to make sure that all readers of this humble little newsletter have access to their product’s Pro features free for 30 days – all you have to do is sign up here and begin including some CTAs in the videos you’re sending to prospects!

Below are a few tips from leading B2B tech sales pros from across our awesome community:

Chris Kosrow – Sales Manager, US Growth – Showpad

Q: How do your best sellers approach “champion enablement”?

A: Make it easy on them! Any strong champion is going to do their best to help you win because it’s a win for them too, but the more that you can over-prepare them, or explain what your plans and intended outcomes are, the better.

Remember, you sell software a whole heck of a lot more than they buy it – so stop asking them what you should expect, or “what the process looks like from here” and instead make suggestions based on what you typically see. Here are some tangible tips on how to do this surrounding your most crucial meetings.

Send a “Champion Prep Email” or have a call ahead of any bigger group calls/demos to confirm attendees and their role in the evaluation, confirm the meeting cadence, share your presentation/demo flow, and confirm the intended outcome and next steps of the meeting to avoid having the awkward “let’s align on next steps” conversation with a big audience.

The most important part of any big meeting is the beginning, so in this prep, ask your champion to kick things off by introducing you, as well as why they are evaluating your solution. This will add instant credibility to everything you say after because your champion has already put your solution in the context of their business.

Immediately after the meeting, send your champion a message thanking them for gathering the group, share some thoughts on what went well, but most importantly, be vulnerable with what may have missed the mark. Pretending that everything went perfectly doesn’t do anyone any favors, but if you tell your champion that you felt like we may not have shown Sally exactly what she wanted to see with the Salesforce integration, it will only put them to work with you on getting Sally’s buy-in.

If you’re lucky enough to have a strong champion, make it easy for them to know what to expect and to do their part in making your combined dream a reality.

Be pleasantly persistent.  60% of customers say no 4 times before saying yes, while 48% (!!!) of salespeople never make even one follow-up attempt.   

Meanwhile, 77% of decision-makers would prefer to connect with you via Zoom than on a phone call.  Make sure your company invests $50 in ordering you a decent 1080p webcam and ring light off of Amazon.

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Let’s cook up something BIG together!  As our industry’s only Scale-as-a-Service platform, we’re the partner for 160+ leading B2B Tech companies on their journey to Scale Better, Scale Faster, and Scale Smarter.  Interested in learning more about membership and how it works?  Contact us for more information.
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