Transcript

Greg Dickinson: My name is Greg Dickinson were the sponsor of this webinar with with Stair Hall introduced in the second but why we're so darn excited about this is I think you know, making this statistic up 99.999% of all companies today think about their internal research and what's important to them and their process and they never stopped to say what are we doing and how does our buyers think about that? Right. And that's where Sarah Mackinnon is very unique in what she does and we're excited to have her on the webinar day because she has done the research the legwork for her customers when she does an engagement. The first thing she wants to do is go okay I'm gonna go out to your buying community some some prospect suspect customers that you've talked to that you pitch that you and find out from them. What do they think of your process? Because let's be real Right. We all kind of have, we're all married to these processes. We need to break down big time. So that's why we've invited Sarah on today to talk to us about the four common B2B buying hurdles and I'm gonna venture to say that the majority of you on this webinar today. Don't know these are hurdles these are someone I saw her research. I was some of them are unexpected, some of them I did not. So without further ado please use the chat. If you have any questions I'll be monitoring that and I'll jump in with Sarah any questions but um quick webinar today about 20 minutes. That's the time we have as we want to keep your attention there on that Sarah, go ahead and do yourself real quick and then get started on these four common B2B buying hurdles awesome. 

Sarah Mackinnon: Well thank you so much Greg. That was that was a great intro. Um Yeah before we get started I actually wanted to say this presentation is really for marketing and sales leaders and and for big thinkers who work in in B2B sass and for whom the buying process feels like a bit of a black box. So maybe it didn't always feel like a black box for you. Um you know, maybe during covid your market changed or you're selling to a different audience or maybe you have a new products but it isn't really like flying off the shelves as as much as you thought it would. So maybe it's really getting hard to find quality leads and and your sales cycle could be getting a little more convoluted. Um you might also be procrastinating on, on setting marketing and sales priorities. Um just because you aren't confident on what to prioritize to make the biggest impact. So if that sounds like if that sounds like if it resonates with you, you you are in the right place, so I will now introduce myself. So a little bit about why I care so much about this stuff. I started my career in marketing about nine years ago writing content um and doing content production at a B two B agency and I've always been really interested in the buyer journey. I've had some time at Toronto startups and and also in luxury travel. And looking back that phase of my career was kind of about understanding what marketing and sales wanted the bio journey to be and um it's usually this kind of thing, this this final thing that we all know, you know, awareness consideration and purchase, but since I started working independently doing bio research and bio enablement content strategy, I have had the chance to really dig into what the buyer journey actually is according to buyers as as Greg alluded to rather than depending on sort of vendor centric frameworks like this. And so we are all very familiar with this start at this for if we're in sales and marketing. Um but it was a bit of a bomb that Gardner dropped a few years ago with their with the research that like three out of four buyers find the buying process to be really difficult and this is really key for for B2B companies who have been investing in content marketing over the last few years um you know, trying to support a more digitally enabled buyer journey. Um, you know, I've seen a lot of tech companies make bigger and bigger investments in content marketing mostly about leadership and like on one side we have like those that think they're the new york times blog and it's like, you know, really elite and amazing writing. And on the other side we have some that are outsourcing their, their SEO content writing and really the only people reading, I think our search engines for what I can tell. So where does that leave you in terms of results? Well, sometimes this results in website traffic and um, you know, even leads at times, but often lead quality is an issue. Um, and you know, some companies will arrest cars at the lead quality problem, but sales cycles just keep getting longer. So it occurred to me and it kind of stopped me in my tracks what if this tsunami of traditional content marketing that we've been creating isn't actually helping buyers what if all this content is actually adding complexity to the purchase process. And we know we know that buyers are spending less time with sales people and more time on their own research and like many buyers do get overwhelmed by this, you know, crazy amount of content. They have to navigate in order to make this high pressure gas purchase and so seeing all these symptoms, you know, in the companies, I'm really interested in what was going on with fires because that is often the perspective that we're missing when we're brainstorming like content ideas and content strategy. So I started asking buyers a few questions, fires, you know, why is buying getting harder? What parts of this process are the hardest to complete for you? Um how do you feel about the quality of the material you get from vendors or the quality of the sales attraction? What kind of buying support would you rather receive from vendors? And so that leads us to today where we're going to talk about a few buying hurdles that are some of the most common that I've seen in my qualitative research with, with B 2B saas fires. And so why do these matter while understanding these types of hurdles as a foundation for content strategy is a totally different approach than just kind of blindly creating content for um, you know, top of funnel and the funnel, bottom of the funnel, the thinking about these buying obstacles before you create content. Um, and really as you consider like sales touch points as well, um, it means that your marketing and um, your sales will actually be designed to help buyers navigate the chaos and make the best purchase decision rather than like overwhelmed women fluff and confuse them. So for vendors, this actually leads to better lead quality and and increased velocity if those are things that you care about, which you should, which you probably do don't let us get into it. Um, this is the first hurdle hurdle. Number one buyers feel slowed down by SDR calls or qualifying calls and why do they feel slow down? Well because buyers tend to feel that these calls offer little value to them and are just kind of another hoop to jump through before they can get their hands on the information they need to qualify, just think about that for a second. They want to qualify you. So it actually, this actually gets worse if they're, if they're really in a hurry trying to make an urgent, urgent purchase and they need to speak to a sales person pronto and instead they get this like gatekeeper who just further delays the process and then, you know, sometimes they have to wait for a call or like chase each other by email to book a call and it's just, it doesn't even end up being the sales. So I want to identify if you have this problem if you're the vendor, so you might actually be getting lots of leads. Maybe if your content, maybe if you like your pricing call to action or form fills on your site. Um, but leads are ghosting before the scr call or maybe, you know, you're getting a lot of leads, they do sign up for the str call, but lead quality isn't great. So you end up with like a lot of data and calls. So overall you, you may be getting a significant number of em que ele, but at the other end very few demos and conversion. So the big question um to think right here is how could you help prospects, better self qualify or disqualify before they become a lead and end up wasting their time and your resources having calls and conversations, they're really not serious or interested or, or a good fit. So I'm gonna tell you a little story just based on something that happens one of my clients because I think it will bring up this point a little bit. So I worked with a virtual event tech company right in the middle of the pandemic, we're getting a wild amount of leads because it was a pandemic and everyone was selling or doing virtual events but they were seeing a huge drop off in the number of demos booked, So like 50% of their demo and pricing form filled leads, ghosted, never went up in a demo and they had no idea what was going on. So I ended up speaking to their buyers and I realized what was happening in their minds. So buyers were in this process where they had two pieces of information in order to, to run their event that they needed to know from a vendor, they needed to know the lead time and they needed to know the price of, of the platform because at this point, no one really knew how to budget for this. So everyone had a pretty pretty for a budget. The fires were actively comparing a bunch of platforms looking for pricing and lead time estimate and this is really how they were vetting or disqualified vendors because you know, events had firm dates but it's kind of range. Um, so in, in their website traffic in the company's website traffic, we saw buyers bouncing from the homepage, the pricing page and then immediately to contact us. So then they reach out and become a lead because it was really their only option to get their hands on pricing or lieutenant focus that wasn't available anywhere on the site. But they themselves, when I spoke to them, they expressed that they hardly knew enough to know if they should be a lead. Like in all it means to be a lead, you know, you will be chased, it will be assumed they are interested in products like try and hide will keep finding with our emails that that kind of feeling of lead. So imagine a buyer super interested in getting their hands on pricing and lead time ASAP so they can either know if it makes sense to keep investing in line with this vendor or you know carry on their merry way and then an SDR reaches out to them and they're very friendly but they don't give them pricing right away and then instead they play email tag to book a call and like some of these buyers were moving so fast, they wouldn't even bother, like they didn't have time for this and they just want to speak to another vendor. And so for those who did end up on the call um later when I spoke to them, they told me that they kind of felt like it was a bit of a bait and switch because they were they were given lead time estimates, but they still weren't giving pricing until, until they actually, you know, had that later sales call and of course the scr would use this time to ask them qualifying questions. But since the buyer themselves didn't get access to the information, they needed to disqualify the vendor, I just felt like a waste of time. So like, you know, buyers will continue to speak with sales in this case for lack of other options, but you kind of see how it like slows down momentum for the buyer and adds a lot more frustrating the process. So the big question at this point is who is really qualified who here? So as the vendor, we often feel like we need to prioritize disqualifying buyers out of our funnel, but the reality is that they're often the ones disqualifying us um as they get closer to a purchase decision and the sooner we can help them with this, the better yes 

GD: Sarah, this is this is Greg, you know, I think this is an interesting point because I think a lot of organizations today fundamentally think about them themselves, right? We have M Qs we have to get, we have targets for that. So let's go drive em que ele or heck if we get the str to have a call, I just experienced this on Monday, 15 minute call and you know, nice. But then here's the five questions. Right, Are you the decision maker? When are you going to do it? What is your budget? How are you, what else, who else are you looking at? And you know, what is your, what is your timeframe? Right. I mean at the end of the day I had some specific questions as well. Those were not answered. So either a go look at another vendor or be wait the two weeks now that they said, hey, the sales person will talk to you now in two weeks. Um, and guess what in their mind, they're, they're qualified in my mind, they're not right from the buyer's perspective. And then in two weeks if I don't get the answers I want, their time is wasted. And so was mine. But I think what you're bringing to the table is Stop 1st, just one second and think about the fact that today the buyer has a lot more power and control and a lot more avenues for for information. So how can you as a sales organization use what Gartner to coin this, I use it every day, it's now a world of digital and human, you need to provide them with digital answers and supplement that guide them with the human approach. It's not a digital to go to your website and then it's a sales process. They need to mix those two together. So I think your research very powerful here and very enlightening around the idea what the buyer thinks of you as a seller totally. 

SM: Yeah. And that's a great example. I I would actually like, I think there's a lot of really informed buyers right now to that they know they're being qualified and like did that feel good to you? Like doesn't like it feels like anyway, it doesn't feel good. Feel good. Oh yeah, Okay. All right. So we're gonna move on to the next hurdle and this is also pertaining to a sales touch point. The buyers are slowed down when sales is the demo gatekeeper and really what process this is slowing down is the process of self education from the buyer like them getting a handle on what the tool actually does and the potential impact on their business and they often want to do this as early as possible in the research process to be honest. Um That said lots of times when I'm speaking with buyers, they do tell me all sorts of reasons why the demo wasn't actually that useful to them. So they'll say things like, um, you know, we'd love to event attend events where we can see the product in action during the buying process instead of just watching demos because in demos they're only really showing you the most expensive option, interesting. Um someone else said just to see some of the features in action is probably more insightful than sitting on demos with the sales route. Excuse me. Um someone else said you know, if you're gonna talk to me about your pricing options, I might not understand it yet because I haven't seen your demo or your platform and interacted with it and it's difficult to make a comparison across platforms and understand how that pricing relates to someone else. So this is a case where you know, pricing was public but the demo is gated and so they were trying to compare, you know, different pricing packages but it was really hard to visualize it without having seen the data go. There is obviously nothing wrong with the idea of seeing software like that is not what we're talking about here. In fact like that is that is really helpful to people. Um It is usually the part of the experience actually that buyers where they get a real feel for whether this is going to help solve their challenges or not, but it is the way we have structured interactions with the demo that can be problematic. So a few problems um one it's gated so they have to feel serious enough to give their email address and you know, consider taking up the time of another human being to walk me through it do it can be long and that means that it's not always customized to their specific needs three. what's on the demo is not always a fair representation of the actual product, like one of those quotes alluded to. So overall, you know, keeping the demo in the hands of sales means that buyers don't get to watch it until they are really ready for the sales type of conversation. And yet, you know what I hear from buyers is that they actually want to educate themselves as much as possible in their own, like, you know, self directed way and actually like if, if there's a way for them to see your products in the wild, Let me tell you that that's what they're gonna do. They're gonna find users, they're going to like ask their friends, they're going to try to see it, you know, without a sales person involved in order to feel like they've had a real experience and can, you know, make an actual objective assessment and so really like it's in your best interests to enable this self directed learning as much as possible because it not only saves you time, but it will improve the quality for you by eliminating prospects as early as possible, who, you know, maybe based on their experience with the product, Maybe it turned out to be not exactly what they thought it was. They realize that it's gonna get fit and then they move on. So the big question here is what are we gaining by getting demos and um, you know, really the obvious answer is leads. That's why we all do it. Um, but if we were to redesign this process to align better with the virus, desire to self educated about the product, we actually might consider, I'm getting demos and you know, in doing so we then have an opportunity to change the purpose of sales calls to become more of a strategic catch point where buyers can bring like, you know, bigger questions that may not have been clarified just in their exploring of the product. So maybe, you know, they'd come wanting to talk about our ally or like implementation planning or many other like huge important topics which really can't be navigated without the help of another human being, which actually relates to the next hurdle. But I will stop here to see if there's any questions. 

GD: Yeah, that one came through on, on chat. And I think I'll go ahead and answer this. But the question was we hear you loud and clear more buyers want 10 most early in the sales cycle, but we can't, we can't scale to that kind of volume if you will. So we're thinking about using our sdrs or ability are inside sales people or the most junior solution engine, um what do you think of that and, and fundamentally that we could spend all day on this topic in my demo spelled backwards is all about automating the demos, right? So we can talk about that. But I'm not, but what I am going to say is our research shows that that's not a good idea because SDR BDR s, you didn't hire them to give presentations and demos, You hired them to qualify and talk to people quickly. 15 minute calls, Right. Number one. Number two, they only know if you did train and they're only gonna know a script, they're not going to go left to go right. They're not going to understand, you know, questions and respond to that. 2nd of all, that's not a lot of fires today don't necessarily want to get a demo. What I call in band between nine and five and that's when your SDR and DDR, they may want to do it before nine after six on weekends. So that kind of approach doesn't maybe right. I think you're going to do more harm than good to be honest with you because if the first impression is not your best and brightest representation of your software, they're most likely going to disqualify themselves and move on when they actually could have been a great prospect. It's just that your presentation, your demonstration of your software wasn't what it could have been because you used, right. Someone that was their fault. They weren't trained for that. You know, being a pre sales engineer for a lot of years. I take pride in the fact that it's a tough job and you need to be adequately trained to do it. So I think that's our answer here on that is that it may, you know, it may look like it solves the problem because it's gonna check those boxes of oh, we're getting more people. But I think you, if you did that, you're going to run the metrics, you're going to find out that those are dropping off more and more because you're not able right to showcase your product in a way you could go into Apple and if all the stretched up broken old models were up front then putting their worst foot forward, they may not sell as many phones as guess what Apple does all the shiny stuff. All car lots wash their cars every two or three days. Why they want to put the best foot forward on your impression. Right? Anyway, that's our answer. Sarah keep going. 

SM: Yeah, I know I'm definitely with you on that. I yeah, I think the piece about having being able to have webinars on demand as well is really, really key just because these decisions are so complicated. Like, you know, people are gonna want to refer back to stuff on the weekends like after hours like it's great to have a recorded video of the demo available for Okay, nice turtle. So this one um, was a really big surprise to me when I, when I started hearing it from fire, so, but it makes sense buyers get confused comparing their old tech stack, you the new platform that they're looking at. So when they are looking for a new tool, many buyers will, will come to you with like an existing MS mash of solutions and you know, they're considering your product and what some of their biggest questions are, like, what functionality is covered by your solution compared to what I used to have, Which platforms can we get rid of or which ones can be downgrade and um to be clear, like I'm not talking about them doing a feature comparison with your competitors, but it's like comparing their old tech stack to your platform. So those are the things like, um you know, we really struggled to understand which features will and won't be covered by the new platform. Um you know, when we switch over, I think I can downgrade my old solution to the basic version and save money, the positive thing. Um, but really this matter of figuring out what their new tech stocks should look like with your solution integrated, um you know, which platforms they can let go of, where they can downgrade. Um it really requires a lot of complex feature analysis on the part of your buyers and they actually don't really have that product knowledge even if they've been through it. So the big question here is who should really be figuring this out? Well buyers usually feel like it's all on their shoulders and to be honest, it's probably, you know, one of the million reasons why you'd be buying is so difficult and yet as you know, the vendor salesperson, you have seen x number of implementations and you are probably the most knowledgeable about, you know, both the product and what you've seen other buyers do. So rather than waiting for buyers to like, you know, painstakingly figure this out on their own, why not ask them about their tech stack preemptively and just like offer your product knowledge to help them make sense of it. Content can also play a role here as well with like comparison, try something. But yeah, the biggest thing I think here to remember is that you aren't really just selling a platform, you're kind of selling a whole new way of working with the current tech stock and like just purely figuring out the technical side of that transition can be a huge hurdle for buyers um yeah, I will stop there before we move on to the next point. Any any questions on this one, nothing came through, keep going. So yeah, that said um there is more to the platform transition that tends to freak people out which brings us to our final hurdle. So buyers are and I chose this word carefully paralyzed by the anticipated fear and confusion of the implementation and you know transition related challenges like working into systems. So I cannot emphasize how huge and scary this is in the mind of SAS fires like and the interesting thing is that they get freaked out about it a lot earlier than you would think um in the buying process particularly also actually when the solution has to connect to um accounting or finance. So buyers often have questions like um what does the implementation look like? How do we manage the accounting transition? How long do we work into systems? Are we ever going to pick a time transition if we never have downtime, they will say things like um you know, what do you need from us to get set up? What do we do, what do you do? Like looking for a lot of project management clarity. Um and you know my biggest hesitation was having the accounting person learned a new system um if I go back to my list of why I did it outweighs the risk but I was pretty damn terrified. That is strong language so all that to say like planning the implementation itself can be one of the areas of the buying decision that feels the riskiest and like honestly, you know, having implementation content and training videos is a good start. But there are, there are other ways of decreasing the feeling of risk for buyers. Um Speaking of one of my clients, they um they had a transition involving an accounting and finance and like counting was being a huge wet blanket on the sale and they actually ended up facilitating a discussion between the client CFO and the CFO of the prospective buyer to talk over some of the stickier points of that transition and that actually really helps. Like that's not a scalable solution but um you could do something like that and like base a basic content guide on that kind of like in depth specific knowledge. All right, so I'm gonna stop there today. Um but this really wouldn't be complete without, without quoting Brent Adamson. Um He said the single biggest challenge of selling today is not selling but actually our customers struggle to buy and I would say like if we don't know what that struggle looks like or you know what it feels like to them, how are we going to market and sell properly? So today Yeah, I walked through a few of these key struggles um but I've just really alluded to some of the solutions so far, but obviously these are different for every mind process and the only real way to like diagnose them properly is to do the research company specifically. 

GD:So a couple of questions came in. So let me but let me just make a comment on this. I think that revelation of the implementation earlier on, I think that you know what we hear a lot is going to talk about this idea. I said it before a digital and human it's not a hey, go to your website and then you'll turn it over to sales. It's digital and human today is a collaborative buying process. It used to be the buyer has a seller had all the information, it was a push. I'll give you this, I'll give you this, we'll do the demo when I'm ready, when you quote unquote, give me all the information you want, we'll talk about implementation when you're ready etcetera. And now the buyer is doing a lot of that work on their own. So a good sales organization need to look at that and say, can I create a digital environment? We call it a portal by the way in which I can collaborate with that buyer by the way, buyers change. New buyers come into the process, buyers leave, they have to do a lot of work internally to get other people to buy into this by. And all that takes a constant exchange of information of asking questions and getting answers. But um, so that's kind of that idea that you have from Brent I think is paramount. Is this idea that it's a living breathing customer journey buyer journey sales journey together. Question for you though is um, how does directly destructive you, how many, how many buyers does a company need to engage with you right. How many is too few or too many was the that's the question is how many buyers do we need to have and I'm assuming the person meant in order to engage you. Yeah that's a good question. So um typically I will use I would like to have 12-15 interviews. That means we probably have to send about three times as many emails um like invite staff people Three. Yeah three times is usually enough. So you know that takes us to like maybe like 40 or 50 buyers. And it's best if those buyers have bought within the last 6 to 12 months and roughly fall into like your ideal buyer profile. Like it helps to identify you know buyers that you want more of versus like maybe low spenders depending on you know the structure of your. Okay and then another one came into, does this approach work for non Saas B2B companies as well? Mm. Yeah so I do have a few um content strategy clients that are nonsense B2B And it's just a little bit different because generally um I have a consulting clients in the U. S. Space and generally just there you know they don't have as many buyers so we can you know we can look at a smaller selection of buyers but we'll do ongoing interviews as they as they get more customers just to kind of like build out the strategy so it can be done um It's just a little bit of a different. Okay, super. That's it. So most informative and you know, as the host Omedym. I mean I think we're we are very much, you know, we like to say we help your buyers by right by providing them with the product experience the product demonstration. And you know, I think what people tend to think about when they hear the word demo automation is the is that it's a product I want and I think today and you emphasize this there is that the buyer wants to be, they need, they need you to demonstrate to them things like scalability, things like security, things like the product, things like hey what will there be other things I can turn off in order to turn on what what process. That's a demonstration. So don't think of the word demo as the solution engineer sits down with you and gives a demo of features and functions. It's it's ultimately the buyer need you to demonstrate to them the things that they need in order to be confident that your solution will meet their needs. And I think that number three you brought up around implementation is another demonstration, demonstrate to me what the implementation looks like. What how many people, how many roles will I need? How long will it take for heaven's sakes. I mean all those right, you ask about price. Price is important but if it's a dollar but it cost $10 million implement that's still budget. So I thank you very much Sarah for for doing the research and and and and jumping on the the webinar with us today. Can you share with the audience how they can reach you? SM: Yeah, for sure. So I do buying process research and content strategy. Um and my website is Sarah Mackinnon Rights dot com. You can also connect with me on linkedin as well. Okay? Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. This is great. Yeah. I had a lot of fun. GD: Thanks everyone for joining today and the replay will be available short time. It will be on the dot com website. Thank you very much. Have a great day, Sarah. Thank you. Great to be with you. It's always by

All right. Welcome, everybody to The Convenience Factor Podcast. I'm excited today, Jeff Wilson's  going to talk to us a lot about sales acceleration. Well, before we get started, what's cool is that I could probably throw a stone in hit Jeff, which is rare for me when doing podcasts. Usually, the last two or three I did, and it was in, I think, Germany in London. So a little bit further distance. But Jeff is here in what we call the upcountry of upstate of South Carolina. So let me let me turn it over to Jeff real quick and let Jeff introduce himself, and then we'll get started. 

Jeff Wilson  0:42  

Hey Greg, thanks for having me. I really appreciate that. So yeah, Jeff Wilson. In regards to sales acceleration, my consultant within that that network, my actual company is settled scope is in addition to my LLC, so I have been in sales executive sales leadership, Greg, I would say pretty much my whole adult life 30 plus years, so very, very, very excited to be a guest on your show here.

Greg Dickinson  1:09  

Well, it's not fair. If he's been in the 30 years, I've been in the 30 years. But look, I look like this is this is audio only. Thank goodness. Right. So let's go. Yes. So tell me a little bit about that. I mean, I reached and I kind of invited you on the podcast is I mean, I think it's an interesting perspective was sales acceleration. So when I start asking my questions, kind of tell me about that model, right, sales, job salesman, ratio, and kind of, I don't think it's something that a lot of people know exists, and you can find, you know, kind of fractional CFO and fractional CTO, but, you know, coming from a sales perspective made very interesting, you know, perspective you guys take? So let's just talk about that real quick.

Jeff Wilson  1:53  

Absolutely, absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. So, the CFO, the CTO, and the one that became most popular before CRO, which is where I place myself and sales acceleration was CMO. Right? So you have to outsource finance, then outsource operations, then outsource marketing. So yeah, it really is great. And you're right, unfortunately, a bad thing is a lot of people don't know people like me exist. So for me, again, 30 plus years of sales leadership, and I tell people all the time, Greg, I am a sales process nerd self-proclaimed, right, like building out those sales processes. So for me, the value proposition is really working with small businesses, right. And in a lot of cases, these small businesses, either one of two things are occurring, the owner of the company, or an executive in the company is charged with leading the sales team. Two things exist in most cases. Number one, they don't want to manage the sales team, you and I, we we are one, right. So we know we can sometimes be difficult to manage, right. So sometimes they don't want to manage the sales team. Another thing that exists and sometimes at the same time, is they don't have the capacity, they don't have the experience to run a sales team. So someone like me and outsourced sales consultant can come in and provide a lot of the stability, put a lot of the processes in place, whether it relates to the sales process, in general implementing a CRM, compensation plans, those types of things, just things that in a small business owner not having walked the walk, right, it's just just didn't have the experience in developing and they have done great with their organization through sheer grit and determination. They built out a great organization, but they feel like they've hit that ceiling, they are they are having trouble growing. So that's where folks like me are able to come in and assist.

Greg Dickinson  4:01  

Okay, and you know, and I think what people are gonna be thinking, right, because that's what I'm thinking is that, well, you know, let's say Jeff has got the chops. He's got the experience, he's done this before, but boy, he hasn't done it in my business, right? So he doesn't understand our positioning, he doesn't understand our differentiation and understand our "market". So help it because I hope you understand that right. From that, because the first question I would want to ask if someone came to me because I think 100% You're right. I mean, even you know, in any business I've ever been associated with, you know, five or six startups, you know, it's always it's always led by one person until that person gets, you know, exhausted and fundamentally what the other problem is, I think, is it's not a full time job. It you know, I'll go do this for three or four hours on Monday and then I get dragged into something else r"unning the business", maybe your product management issue, a product issue, a customer issue, and then I'll get back to it tomorrow right so but let's before we kind of log off into that problem, but walk me through that kind of that if people have any reaction than I do, which is hey, you know, you don't know my business.

Jeff Wilson  5:04  

Yes, yes, you're exactly right. If I get an objection to the value proposition that I just laid out to you, it is exactly that. All right, Jeff, great, but you don't know anything about selling labels and ribbons. Okay, You're exactly right. So the conversation, at that point, Greg really has to be very pointed. And I say that the individual, you're exactly right.  I don't have experience in your industry. But I don't need to, because I'm going to be working alongside you. And Greg, with all due respect, you don't have the experience that I hold, as it relates to sales leadership. So in tandem together, we're going to spend a lot of time on the front end, you're going to be helping me understand your industry, I'm going to be there to call on you to ask you questions as we go through this. But at the end of the day, you're going to be my resource to understand your industry, your company, but all of these things that I'm going to outline for you, they are industry, agnostic, you need to have a plan, you need to keep score of your plan. And again, if those two things are happening, and we constantly are tweaking the plan to ultimately get the result that you want in terms of revenue growth, we're successful.

Greg Dickinson  6:29  

So can you understand that so So? So? Is that your value prop to the executive? Two questions? Is there a size and company that really is hot for you, or kind of, you know, you've had success? A lot of places or size? And then you know, kind of if you think about selling right to poor question, think about selling there's all kinds of areas, right there is the you know, the sales team there's recruiting of the sales team, there's that "sales process", there's a kind of pipeline management, there's you know, activity kind of management, and you call the scoring just now so, you know, is there a kind of a size that works best for you? And then kind of those disciplines, right, that are all required to be successful? Are you where do you start in a certain place? Or does it matter where you start? Or, you know, how do you build that, you know, that success and get those quick wins and help that person to see the light of hey, you know, this is really gonna go to help us?

Jeff Wilson  7:26  

Absolutely. You touched on that. The question of whether or not this is a full time, 40 hour, opportunity or need, and it is not. So for me, a sweet spot for me and the company, is those small businesses that are under $20 million. And the reason for that is Greg, someone's doing over $20 million, they are probably going to invest in a full time salary for a VP of sales, the employee burden that comes along with it. So again, under that $20 million, really is a good fit. Okay? Yes, there is a starting point of all of those things that you listed. And the fundamental base of that is a sales process. Okay. So when I sit down, talking with the owner or the executive team, I'm really wanting to understand where what what's that endpoint? Where do they want to be? So, I don't know, Greg, if you or your listeners are familiar with EOS entrepreneurs operating system. So an interesting fact EOS is is something that small businesses adopt and implement from a standpoint of running their organization. And it really identifies the operation seat, the finance seat in the sales seat. Now, interestingly enough, there is a venture capital organization called the Firefly group. They purchased EOS about three years ago. Last summer, they purchased sales acceleration. Okay. So we now have a nice toolkit to bring into our clients, but fundamentally understanding that sales process, I need to know where does this organization want to be in three years, and then work backwards, right? So if you need to have this in revenue, or these benchmarks, or these KPIs in place, let's work backwards from that. So the sales process really takes me there. I typically will start to say, let's talk about these these very decorated wins that you've that you've amassed in your organization's timeline and history. And then we walk through the sales steps that got us there. Then I say, give me one or two that you really thought were in your grasp, but you lost them at the last minute. And then we walk through the sales process of that. Once we memorialize that, and I'm pointing to my left Here I've got a large whiteboard. Once we document that, we find very quickly, Greg, that there was a sales process step in the sales process that was missed, right for the ones that we lost versus the ones that wrote one. The reason being that sales process was never documented. So we start there, then we take a look at, okay, this is a sales process, we feel like if repeated, we'll we won't when you talk about recruiting, we then look at what is the existing sales team that we have? What's their capacity? What's their bandwidth? From a standpoint of lead generation marketing? Those types of things? Can it get us to that number that the organization wants to be? So that really takes us to that next step? Let's build out the sales team. When do we need to have those folks in place? And we've obviously, as a part of the sales process? We've we've understood at this point, how long does it take us? Right, from identifying the lead to closing the sale? So that's really where we start in regards to that process, spending a lot of time with the ownership. And again, overcoming that objection, if it surfaces around the fact that you don't know our industry, you don't know our company, understanding that sales process in the very beginning. We get past that very quickly.

Greg Dickinson  11:20  

Yeah, listen, I can definitely relate and see that, you know, it's interesting, right? It's very interesting for folks. Yeah. Are we offshore our development, right? People don't even think twice about the fact that we're going to, why do you do that? Well, there's different levels of expertise I need, I can't hire all those expertise. So it's, you know, really good reading, you could use the cloud as an example, to say the same thing, right? The reason we go to cloud is it has all the attributes we need. And when we need it, we go get him. Right. And but that's, you know, and I think what you're hitting on that people need to kind of comprehend is this, this idea that A: it's fractional, B: it's an unbiased, and sometimes probably painful process to say, hey, here's your sales process. And by the way, it really, you're, you can't call it a sales process. It's a motion of some sort you're doing, but it's not really the, you know, the process. So I think it's pretty cool to have that, you know, unbiased review of the process. And then, you know, bringing bringing forward those other ideas. So, you know, hats off to you, I think that's a pretty cool thing. I'm going to flip the script a little bit here now and say, okay, so you talk to a lot of companies, you've been doing this for a while you got 30 years experience, etc? If I, if you were talking to a business five or 10 years ago versus today, would you talk to them differently? Right, Have you have you found that those different sales tactics that used to work are no longer working and kind of, you know, hitting on that we call the convenience factor, right, the idea that the that's a buyer has fundamentally changed and what sales need to do to continue to sell is different than it was 510 years ago, 20 years ago, but I like to focus on the on the near term of five or 10, what do you think about that? What do you what do you what's your experience?

Jeff Wilson  13:03  

Yeah, absolutely. From the building blocks the process, in the things that I've talked about, that I'm building out as an outsource sales leader, haven't changed, but the delivery has, and you know, when you talk about customers out, if you'll allow me, I'd like to talk about two types of customers, one being the sales team, right, a customer of the in the company, and then the final customers, the ones that are purchasing it. So again, like you said, with a convenience factor leading remotely, right, leading remotely, you have to be very, very nimble at that. And what I mean is, in years past, you know, usually a sales leader coming in Monday morning, hey, let's have a roundtable meeting. My offices is near your office, and we're all kind of gathering together. Let's talk about what the week looks like. Let's celebrate wins. You know, a lot of companies I'm sure you've been a part of them and may be a part of your company. We get a new contract, we ring the bell, right? It might be available on the wall. It might be a cowbell. It might be a trumpet that sounding but we're celebrating that right around for mine because

Greg Dickinson  14:13  

I don't see it right here. But I do have one in every place I've been it was gifted because I always had a bell ring and it was pretty easy, a pretty crappy bell. And so this last place I purchased my last one, this guy gave me a really nice cowbell. I'm at my wit's like it's here. I know it's here. So that's pretty funny, though. Thanks for bringing that up.

Jeff Wilson  14:31  

Yeah. Well, and I'll take this a step further. I won't mention the company, but I really liked this idea. It's a software company. So you can relate to this. But when they would bring on a new customer in the corporate office over the audio sound system, they would play the wedding march. Right. So we're married, we are partnering with somebody.

Greg Dickinson  14:56  

I need to I mean, listen, at the end of the day sales is hard, right? And I think it gets You know, there's a, there's a gentleman on my team, I won't, I won't embarrass him. But, you know, he was always on the delivery side of software. And he used to always pick on us salespeople, right? He just, you know, when I ran sales for Ariba, he was with me there and it was all bla bla bla bla bla now, right? He's part of a startup, our startup, right? And he's the kind of selling things are like you know, and so, you know, now you kind of appreciate why the heck we celebrate, right? Because it's, you know, more can go wrong than can go right. You know, it's like, it's like one of my best sales leaders ever worked for us to say, Greg, you always tell our customer don't be afraid to tell me yes. Yes, only bad things could happen for me. So I'm gonna be very intended, right? Because, yes, that can happen. So anyway, I interrupted you, but I thought that was a pretty cool, you really think they're so? So you're talking about remote and being in limbo checker?

Jeff Wilson  15:53  

Yes. So nimble to the to the sales team, I tell you as as an outsourced sales leader. And let me address that fact that I didn't earlier talking about full time. So in my role, if I'm an outsourced sales leader, I'm given that that company eight hours per week, okay? All right, so, so in that with working remotely, and being nimble, you and I are using Microsoft Teams for this, there's a lot of others. But I can have an impact on a group and an individual in a matter of minutes, right? sharing documents, sharing screens, those types of things. So I have found in these past two years, we've been forced to do it. But Greg, what's come out of this is a level of efficiency. It's really been fantastic. Now, not to say that that takes away, I still am having face to face meetings with the sales teams that I'm in charge of leading, and then transitioning to the ultimate customer. Overall, I will say customers have embraced the technology, they have embraced the opportunity to have these conferencing web based demos. And again, talk about a level of efficiency. Now granted, when we're getting into the core presentation, we're discussing a contract. Fortunately, the world's opening up more more companies are allowing us on site. But in the early stages, when we are again, vetting and trying to confirm is this a good fit for us and the customer, the prospect video conferencing has been fantastic, and level of efficiency has come about. So that's really what hits my mind. You're like, what was different, you know, from from five years ago,

Greg Dickinson  17:40  

and I think you'll probably agree with this, right? I think the first thing that's encouraging for me is that, you know, kind of, you know, WebEx and GoToMeeting have been around for 20 years, right? And you can always do this, but people are really reluctant to be like, you and I are right now on a video looking each other as it just we're lucky now. You know, 90% of every online meeting, I have people you know, people are there pictures, then what you just hit on is what I what I try to tell people, when obviously, it's a little bit about what we do as well here in Oakland, him is the fact that you got to be concise, right? I mean, people are distracted today, when you get someone in a room, it's much easier to to keep them for an hour really and keep them engaged. But if they're on a zoom or a team or a WebEx or whatever it is, right, they can take their camera off, they can go do other things, they can look at their phone, and somebody will do it without even consciously knowing that everyone can see him doing it. Right. And so I think the I think the idea here is that, you know, is you got to also make sure that you use that time wisely, right. And like, you know, we're gonna do this podcast, we're running it that, you know, we're going to be running up to the 20 minute mark, why 20 minutes? Well, because, you know, people will listen for 20 minutes and move on. If I made it an hour, Jeff, no one's gonna listen to us. Right. And I think that's where, you know, our customers call it, you know, the, you know, obviously, through our technology, but they're able to deliver what they call snackable answers to questions in a quick burst, right? 12345 minutes, not 90 minutes, right? I think that what you're saying is, well, it's it's deficient. But if you're I'm sure if you're a consultant with team, yes, you guys want to use it wisely. Right? Just because you have an hour doesn't mean you should run the follow up.

Jeff Wilson 19:14  

Yeah, yeah. And I'll give, I'll give you a plug, because I've had the honor of having you on my podcast, right, the resource podcasts and you talked about the fact that you can take from a video standpoint and really go to where somebody's wanting to be, you know, they they're not, they're not having to sit there and work and look at a 30 minute demo to find how to do this step. Right. So you have taken them you have the ability and I think a unique selling point for for AMI down is that you can take them directly to that is searchable as categorized. So your  hats off to you for recognizing what the consumer is wanting.

Greg Dickinson  19:52  

 But it just behavior right at the end of the day. If you look at the searches on YouTube, I think I lost the stat. I think it's like 64 something percent of all searches start with how to, right? Because how do I change my email? How do I change wiring my house? How do I add a speaker system? How do I, you know, do this in software? Right? And we all right would prefer that's what you and I are talking about here, this video interaction, we'd all prefer to do that, right? I mean, you look at the face to face meetings in the 90s, you know, and then you know, and now then it moved to online, because even back to my last time, Hiperos, you know, customers would say, Don't come to me, right? Because if you fly all the way to Phoenix, there's only gonna be two of us in the room because the other 15 people are spread out across the world, right? So there's no use you doing it? I was old school. Yes, I'm coming, I'm gonna put a suit on, you know, I'm going right. If I'm going to ask for money, I need to be there. But but so that started changing. But now, right, we we the one you know, there is any good news out of what happened last two years is that we've been forced to be remote. But I think there's a you know, that discipline of being able to use video efficiently is what needs to be done right? Don't don't just, Hey, I got you out for an hour. So let's just use the whole hour. And I'll you know, I'll ask him every question I want to ask him then I'll ask him again, those same questions. You know, not not not why so so from a sales perspective and coming in and helping organizations. We talk a little bit about about video but but have you seen any of the you know, this idea this concept of there's a lot more written about this now around salespeople need to be more guiding, right guided selling approach, because a lot of the quote unquote, data they used to have that the customer had to come to them for they can find on the internet. So there's, there's a little bit less of a window of of time being spent with that that buyer. And so hopefully, they're a little bit because I that, you know, that's gonna have to be a learned skill. I think I just found your philosophy.

Jeff Wilson  21:49  

Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I like to use and I think it falls into the same term is a consultative, right. I mean, search, certainly. And this is, this is a part of the sales process. And I'll build out because we were talking about I use the term needs analysis, right. So we, you talked about getting to yes, I tell my folks, the quicker we can get to know, the better off we are, we need to find out, is this worth our time and their time. So to your point, I work very closely with with organizations and sales teams. To drill down, we just start whiteboarding, what are questions that we're going to ask? And are some of these questions fluff that we can get directly to the point? So I like what you term guided, is asking the right questions to see is there alignment against what the customer needs? versus what we have to offer? How quickly can we get there? So absolutely. Now not guided in the sense of let's let's make them purchase this. But let's guide them to a quick discernment. Right? of should we even be talking? But let's let's get there very quickly. And so yeah, I very much subscribe to that philosophy. And a lot of what I do is getting to that point now, certainly thought provoking questions, because, you know, they're different different types of pain, right, like Leighton pain, real pain. I mean, you know, again, getting to that point, some people don't realize that they have as big a problem as they have that we can help them fix. Some don't want to realize. So, again, God had questions to get to that standpoint to uncover it, or so valuable.

Greg Dickinson  23:40  

We can do a whole podcast on that. I mean, I think this idea of consultative, and getting to know right, because it ended up getting, I talked to someone it's funny because you know, my technology a little bit is modernizing and automating some things and I talked to a CRO about three months ago. So I'm Greg, that's all BS. Because if I get some on the phone, I can convince him to buy and I'm like, I applaud. I'm like, Are you serious? Like, like, like, you make an app? And you really believe that right? Because I think that I think that the the approach that works to your point is let's ask some questions. Let's, you know, uncover some things. Let's have a conversation. But the end of the day, if it's no, I'd rather know that this week than six months from now, and it's a hard skill, right? Because most salespeople don't want to watch that keep it accurate. There's, there's a 2% chance or something like that. So I think that, you know, hats off to you to be able to walk in again, I think that's one of the vantages of this you know, kind of fractional is you can be brutally honest, right and come in and sometimes say, hey, you know, that picture is not not not as good as it should be. Here's what we need to do to change that. And I think that's sometimes people get all wrapped up in activity, right? And activity is not necessarily progress. So, hey, we're running down the wire here. You see, you touch a lot of people you talk to a lot of people give my audience one or two words of advice. I can take back to the office today and be be better at what they do.

Jeff Wilson  25:02  

Wow. I would say probably voice, just voice of the customer, right Lake lane and be willing to get some critical feedback on how you're doing as an organization. However, be prepared to act on it. If you're not going to act on it, it's not worth your time and actually couldn't could be hurtful. If you do ask for feedback, and don't act on it. But what I would say is, get in front of it be vulnerable, be willing to listen to what your customers think about you. I have seen companies pivot from a from a remarkable standpoint, when they're willing to do that.

Greg Dickinson  25:44  

Great advice, and it listens, no one wants to hear bad news. But you know, to your point, right, get out, get out there and have those conversations and get that feedback. And I think, you know, very strong advice there that don't ask how can I help you? And then come back three months and ask you How can I help you again? Or what do you think because if you haven't done anything, if they give you three things that are really important to them, and you haven't addressed any of them any way, shape, or form, and if you can't do you got to be honest about that. Hey, I know that's important you but based on where we are organizational, we're not gonna do that right now. It's probably something we'll tackle next year. That's just as good, right? But don't thank you very much, Jeff. Write it all down and then don't do anything. Hey, Jeff, thanks so much. I love what you guys are up to love for you spending some time with us today. And we'll be talking soon. I'm sure have a great day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Kerry Sokalsky: https://presalesmastery.com

Chris White: The 6 Habits of Highly Effective Sales Engineers, https://www.amazon.com/Habits-Highly-Effective-Sales-Engineers/dp/0578521903 

https://www.omedym.com , https://www.linkedin.com/company/omedym 

TRANSCRIPT:

Greg Dickinson: Here we go guys, welcome to convenience Factor podcast today I got two very special guests on here. We're gonna focus specifically on something that I think wouldn't have happened five, 10 years ago and the idea of solution engineering, pre sales and the need for this great gracious donation they gave to the community. So before we get into that title and everything, let me start with Kerry, Kerry, introduce yourself and what you got what you do. Sure. 

Kerry Sakolski: Hey Greg, thanks for for having us on today Kerry Sakolski and the president, founder of Presales Mastery. We do one on one demo call coaching to really significantly uplift each individual S. E. S ability to deliver demos super effectively. We use a scorecard that has 103 different metrics on it to really track at a very granular level How people are improving and how much and uh it's um, it's done over a three-month period so we can really reinforce feedback and get it to be sales, muscle memory but tends to be very effective. We see massive improvements, usually about 20, improvements empirically on double delivery going through the program. 

GD: That's a follow up conversation we're going to have for sure. So before we go there chris go ahead and what's going with you? Yeah. 

Chris White: Hey Greg, thanks for having us on chris white. Many folks or at least some people know me for a book. I published a few years ago called the six habits of highly effective sales engineers and and frankly that was after years of being in the field myself as a sales engineer, recognizing some of the mistakes that I made and had to correct and then taking over a team of sales engineers, recognizing that they had been made many or were making many of the same mistakes that I had made for many years. And At the time there wasn't a lot of training out there. So I created, this is actually in 2010, I created some training for them and that turned into the book I published and then I launched the business, believe it or not, in March of 2020, I launched tech sales advisors full time and we run training workshops for sales engineers and actually for ES and s s together to do team selling. And the one thing that makes our program unique is I'd like to say sales training doesn't work for sales engineers because it falls on deaf ears, but demo training doesn't necessarily either, because that's just one small part of what we do. So, so our training is a is a little bit, you know, it's, it covers the broader role of the sales engineer and frankly I work closely with Carrie and our our two programs fit very closely together, so that's a little bit about me and my my business and happy to be here. 

GD: Fantastic. And that's kind of why, you know, we are here because I think what you both have done is, you know, I started my career at Arriba in 1997 presales proud of that. I was a pre sales engineer, didn't even know it, right. I was in charge of a God where we got this product go out and show people too because we're really not the software business, but we needed to grow our business. And that led me to e commerce, which led me to Ariba, but you know, I think what's interesting is as, as, as any organization, right? You have the A players B players and then you have perhaps C and D.  right? And and there was really no way to, you know, gosh, it was impossible to say to someone who I'm gonna spend an hour or two with you watch your demo because if you don't, you know, how do you watch a demo right back then you, it was a face to face meeting, I go to every meeting with your team and that's just hard. So I think what you guys have done is said, hey, there's a way to improve people and now I think with video and, and, and, and in those aspects you can review what they did and you know, kind of like what gong and chorus are doing in the sales side, injection handling etcetera. So hats off to you what I think, right? I'm making assumptions, but I think when we talk about the presales solution engineer buying guide right of technology, you guys were so close to industry, you came up with this idea. So you know, rather than, I'll let you two, I'm sure you do this quite a bit, you know how to not speak over each other, but let's talk about that for a second. So for my audience, Kerry and Chris produced a document, a guide, if you will, um that clearly wasn't needed 10 years ago because there was absolutely, you know, maybe one piece of technology for social engineering. I'll let them tell you how many quote unquote vendors or suppliers or you know, technologists etcetera are in the guide. So whichever one you want to start, Let's talk about the buying guide what it is first. Let's talk about what it is. 

CW: Yeah, sure. So the guide is for people familiar with like Gardner market scopes and things like that. It's meant to be a, it's meant to really solve two problems, right? It was for the pre sales buying community that was out there. We chris and I recognized pretty early on that despite the fact that this space was really exploding over the last two years, there was a gap in terms of awareness. There wasn't a universal awareness in terms of all the vendors that were out there. Uh some of them focus on marketing and do a great job of that. They've raised lots of money, they've they've gotten their names out there really well, a lot of them focus on the product and they haven't really necessarily made themselves as well known as they could be. And so we wanted to help the vendors or you get, you know, close that awareness gap, but there was also a clarity gap and that was, it was really confusing to a lot of buyers out there in terms of what each of the vendors actually did and what problems they solve, what use cases they addressed. And so chris and I got to chatting and felt that the market had sort of hit a critical mass in terms of there were enough vendors in the space now, they were getting enough traction that it justified some sort of clarity around what was going on in the market and there really wasn't much out there. Uh there wasn't really a report like this. In fact, the G2 pre sales category didn't exist until about a month ago. And so we decided last august to approach a bunch of the vendors and see if there was an appetite to participate in this type of exercise. And we decided very early on that this was not going to be a pay to play type of exercise. We didn't want to artificially restrict who was involved because we wanted to be as inclusive as possible to make the report as useful as possible. And we got a really, really warm reception from the community That this was something that the vendors really wanted to participate in. So that was kind of nice and of the 24 vendors that we originally invited to participate, 21 agreed to to join our little fledgling survey slash report. Uh and we went through this Long sort of six month engagement where we did a ton of research. We interviewed the vendors in terms of where do they position themselves in the market? How do they see themselves compared to the competition? What use cases are they solving? We did deep demos with each of them, we sent out pretty detailed R. F. I. S and R. P. S, which, you know, the presales audience obviously very familiar with and capture a lot of information and you know, we, we came out with what we think is a really interesting report and one of the the sort of benefits of going through this exercise was that chris and I came up with a way to look at the marketplace in a logical manner. There's a lot of different types of vendors that are out there and we came up with five sort of focus areas that we're calling them kind of like subcategories that really we think hell will help pre sales leaders identify a where their biggest problems are and then prioritize based on that where they should be focusing their investment. 

GD: Yeah. Yeah. Listen, I'm a, I'm an afterthought in your book because we were one of those that focused on product and not marketing and and listen, shame on us, right? But at the end of the day, we've got huge successful customers and now we'll go and spend money on marketing. But but more importantly, when I, when I listen to your first webinar about that and when I kind of got the book, I think overall helped write, you know, who are we, who, you know, and from a buying perspective and understanding that, hey, you know, solution engineering, pre sales automation. Right, Okay. Well it's an RFP category. There's the demo category. There's the, and then within the demo category. Right? I mean, I think it helps when I talk to people. Now, I can clearly say, hey, yeah, there's some, there's some great products out there, great companies. Listen to me, there's really no competition because the market is not that mature yet. You add them all together. We have x number of customers and it's not measured in the thousands, Right? I don't care how big people are and what they've done. It's just that the money hasn't been there yet. Right. So I think what you guys are doing is saying, hey, let's help that industry grow. My hat's off to you because you look at, you know, a good friend of mine that started a kind of start off as a blog called spend matters and he became the resident expert in e procurement, Right? Because he did what you did. He just went out and started gathering data and information and then, you know, he made into a business eventually where you know, where people would buyers would pay for the research he did, right? Because it was extensive. You know, listen, partner charged a lot of money, right? For what, for what you get from them and and they're typically, I think, I think what I really um what people need to kind of think about what you guys went ahead and did is someday Gartner will have some information about the space, but it's been such a afterthought in the industry, right of o solution engineering, grab the projector, get plug it in, get the screen ready and when the sales guy stops talking 48 minutes into a 60 minute call, it's your turn to show everything we have to do, right? I mean listen, I'm not being sarcastic, I was in that role. Right? Um so you know, I think what I think what you've done is it, you know, hats off to you. So chris walk a little bit more into that a little bit. Right? So we got we got um buying community was a goal. Clearly, clearly there was a gap 24 vendors, you're not gonna talk about each vendor, but overall, what did you guys learn that you went holy crap, I never thought of that. Like give me some of that, they have seen stuff. 

CW: Right. Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's really good and you know, some of the key observations that we made Greg first. It's it's really impressive. I mean, you you said five years ago, I'll say three years ago there wasn't the market for this, I would say the majority of the vendors in the study were founded three years or less. So, you know, and one of the observations is what they've built, I'm going to say collectively is really impressive. There are some really impressive capabilities out on the market. So, so that was sort of the first observation and things are the products are changing very rapidly, expectations are changing very rapidly. So, and and it's, you know, to your point, one of the things that we've said is if you're thinking about these solutions, you really need to consider the product and the company and the people behind the company and the maturity of the product doesn't necessarily and versus the maturity of the company aren't necessarily, you know, a good indicator, right? So there's some organizations that have been around for, You know, 10 years or at least the product's been around, but they're not a very mature company or vice versa. So that was that was one the other thing is, or another thing is the taxonomy or the terminology is very different in this space across the board from different vendors, think about Crm, if if if you if you if you open and and by the way, studies have shown that there's something like 400 Crm tools or more more than 400 crm tools, what would you expect to see in a crm account, contact lead opportunity, right. I mean there's there's some basic fundamental data you would expect to see. You look across the tools and even within the different focus areas they use very different terminology. Even even terms like demo, the word demo or the object, demo is different in in you know the tools in in the demo automation space. 

GD: Um one other observation that will make and then I'll then I'll invite Kerry to share is and this should this should come to no surprise to anyone who sells software before you invest in one of these solutions. You really need to think about your process and your methodology just buying a tool is not going to solve problems right? You really have to think about how are we going to operate differently? And and so there's more to it than just automating or buying software. Yeah. And I think that I think that leads to the curve, right? I mean at the end of the day we were in the bottom of the first, maybe there's only one out of the top of the first for heaven's sakes right? And and the role. Right? I think there's some head there's some winds right? Product centric is now no longer you know an article written by nobody. It's it's real right, buyers want their hands on the product, there's more P. O. C. S than ever before. I can, you know, 15 years ago people would say no, I'm not doing it right too bad, we're not doing it. But we were in control back then today, the buyer has a lot more control. So I think the, I think the role of presales has been elevated. I think the the number of jobs that were responsible for right has has increased. We have a bigger seat at the table. Um and so I think what you're, what you're hitting on is that, you know, as these things change vendors like myself are trying to hit that, you know, that that that market perhaps is a moving target. Um, and and philosophically you gotta find the company that believes in the values of ahmidam right in my case, right? We gotta we gotta find the ones that are saying, hey, the buyer needs to be able to buy in an easier way and there are others that say no no no no don't do that. What we want to do is give the tool to a to a solution engineer to make their job easier, right? Because there's a scale problem. Well, those are two different conversations, right? So I think that's what your, what you guys have highlighted is hey, You know, there's more than one way to add value to the solution engineer, right? And you produced it wasn't, it wasn't to vendors, it was 24 you said plus there's a handful of afters right? You added to the mix. Hey, just out of curiosity. So it started 24. If you don't write it today, how many would there be? I just want to know How many. Okay. Yeah. So it's because because you know, the analogy you use is when I joined a Reba in 1997, there were three players in the procurement by 1999 it was 47. It's crazy. Listen, 10 years later there was four. Yeah, yeah. Well if it will and if I, if I might I have one more thought and then kick it over Kerry is companies are going, I believe that companies are going to be investing in more than one tool in this space. Right? There really is a pre sales technology staff, right? There's, there's pre sales operations and oversight and management. There's what we call pre sales opportunity execution, there's, there's demo automation and within demo automation, there's different solutions that can be paired together. So I think one important point, I think for the listeners to take away from this is that don't think in terms of what's the one tool that I need in precincts. There isn't one, I think, I think, you know, in five years, the more sophisticated pre sales teams are probably gonna have three or four tools that are explicitly, you know, purchased for their use. There's a, there's a provider right now we're not gonna mention my name or there's that, that that that you are on the surface, you would say Greg you compete. We're actually in conversations right now to take their technology what they do because it's different than ours and embedded in our, in our strategy, right? Because it helps the solution if you do X, y and Z. That therefore can be married to what we're doing no different than, you know, we got customers that own sales enablement platforms and we become a, you know, we're not replace, we're augmenting that, right? Like Crm Holy Mackerel, Right? How many add ons are that? So I think it's a very valid point. Is that the, it's in the early stages, I think you're correcting me, you're right three years ago. I don't know. When I started coming to him, there was like, I'm looking around like, who else is doing anything in here? There was one player that I found, right? And then now, right, you know, when I talked to investors, like, we'll give you the page, there's, you know, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know, Kerry, go ahead. What was your kind of, we were on the topic of, you know, kind of, you know, observations, learned things. You're like, Holy Mackerel. I didn't, I didn't expect. 

KS:Yeah, lots of great points brought up by chris and yourself Greg. I mean, I think it's, it was really interesting. I was talking to just to your last point around the some of these vendors being very complimentary. I I think the other thing to realize is that each of these vendors also thinks they're fairly unique in a lot of ways they are, even if they are in the same space. I was talking to a V. P. At one of the vendors the other day and their response in terms I was asking them, who are they seeing in their competes and they mentioned one of the other top companies in this space and they said ultimately though we don't think we compete with them and frankly I agree with them. The use cases for both of those two vendors are so different that one of those vendors is in the wrong compete. Right. And I think that's one of the key learnings that chris and I found that's really critical to point out is buyers really need to understand what their use cases are and be able to prioritize them because they're they're not going to solve everything with one tool as chris just mentioned. Right. And so you really understand, Okay, what are my biggest issues and how do I want to actually leverage these particular technologies to get the most games? We think about them automation as a subcategory, there are a lot of different uses for this. It could be used, top of funnel that marketing might ultimately own, it could be used as a post sale tool for helping educate our customers reel right now, pre sales doesn't have to be involved in demo into your existing customers anymore, but who necessarily owns it and what their, their influences over the purchase and the use of it and who's gonna, who's gonna fund it. These are all considerations that by organizations need to think about that. If they don't think about that, they're gonna run in a little bit of circles and spend their gears a little bit in their evaluation cycles, because they're not gonna know if they're evaluating tools. 

GD: You know, I couldn't agree more. I mean, there are, listen, I mean, at the end of the day, when one of the biggest challenges of my previous startup, that that that we had X. It was the, you know, customer success person was always saying, I need pre sales resources to demo to these customers and and the pre sales leader was like, I don't get paid on that. You know, Greg either fix the comp plan or we're not doing it right? And it was always this bad, no matter what I did, it was never enough comp or just whatever, because listen, I'm never gonna I'm never going to stack the deck on customers more than new logos, right? And that's what the team was being paid. So, it was always this confrontation until I find someone your own person for heaven's sakes, like, like, what are you doing? Right? Well then then the quality wasn't as good because you didn't, you? I'm a really big believer and like I watch these companies that go and say, oh well, you know, top of funnel off the website will put the lead. The junior pre sales person of the SDR BDR make me throw up. Right? Because that's not the SDR BDR. Their job is to prospect. They weren't ever that, that just is more insulting than ever that the demo is not really valuable. Right? Anyone can go do it anyway. I, I digress because it's one of my pet peeves. But let me talk to you a little bit about the guides out. I'm sure there is going to be, you know, updates. But, but have you, have you been asked or what's your thoughts on a service ecosystem around this? Right. I mean, you know, well, every one of us that sell software in this space will say, oh yeah, deployments to our exercising, you're up and running blah blah, blah blah. But listen, let's be real, right, What you guys highlighted on is different use cases, different people. They may not have bought software before they deployed software before. They may not have those resources that are available. So have you guys, I'd love to just get your thoughts on what are you seeing there? Right. Um, and you're pointing to me. 

CW:No, I'm not. 

GD: No, you're pointing to Kerry, go ahead Kerry. I mean seriously? I mean that is that Chapter two, is that what you see in there? 

KS:I think it's going to eventually have to come into play. I don't think we're seeing it yet, but I think we're starting to see anecdotal evidence that needs to be there. And what I mean by that is I've talked to more than a few companies that have tried to roll these particular solutions that enterprise wide and failed pretty miserably and I think there's a lot of variables that go into play there. I think some of these companies are newer and they haven't necessarily, you know, built their implementation methodologies out as quite as mature as would be expected in a very large enterprise organization. I think there's the other challenge and we sort of alluded to it earlier, is that because there's so many different, you know, cooks in the kitchen that are potentially users of these tools that there's conflicting objectives and goals for how they should be used, how they should be deployed internally. Right. And if they don't get resolved beforehand, then it's not gonna work. And that's where we're hearing some interesting anecdotal evidence there as well. Um, so I think that's another thing that I think organizations should really start to think about getting the quick win right. Take a specific division or unit or geography, roll out there, get that success story and then use that as a way to sort of successfully roll it out enterprise wide from that perspective. I you know, I think as these, a lot of these companies start to raise lots of money and build their organizations and, and, and, and become more mature. They're able to, to create better customer success and professional organizations. We're not seeing that as a focus for a lot of these companies yet. It's a chicken in the egg. Right. I mean there is no that I know of a solution engineer on the bench waiting for the next project and if you bought something new, who's going to deploy it like and you end up with, well, yeah, I'll do it next week because this week I got a whole bunch of opportunities to manage and if you don't figure out a way to engage that person and the not, I can't do it as a vendor, you have to do it to set hey Kerry or chris are going to deploy this and by the way they're gonna be taken off the line for a little bit and compensated fairly for doing so because otherwise it's the, I'll get to it next week. I'll get to it next week cause nothing is more important than the opportunity is gonna close quote unquote this quarter. Right. And that's what we're, you know, we kind of a peeling back the onion on that problem. Right? Because tomorrow our customers are deploying in 2000 and it doesn't happen overnight and it takes like anything else in life. It takes a focus and someone's gonna have to step up and say, yeah, I own that deployment, it can't be that Gregor carrier chris on the on the ground that's, you know, daytime is the, you know, only you guys can do a day job and a night job with a buyer guy. Well, but you know, it's an important point Greg, I mean, you know, 11 of the place for certainly a number of the vendors in the, you know, again, what we called up the presales oversight and management space is that and and they say that one of their biggest competitors is, well, we'll just do it in Salesforce right? Or we'll we'll just do it in. But if it's going to be a customization, Salesforce and the pre sales Leaders of pre sales team is in essence held hostage by the rev ops team or the Sales Ops team and the Salesforce Admin groups, right? And it takes 6 to 9 months to get anything done there. Right. So teams, pre sales leaders really need to think through how are we going to implement? Who's going to be responsible? And and I do think that there's I see the sort of the emergence of sort of a cottage industry, if I can use that term of consulting services, supporting organizations, implementing and rolling out these tools right? From a methodology perspective from an implementation perspective, even from a care and feeding perspective and if I may in terms of services that we've thought about, we even envision an advisory type service to frankly the vendors at some point and to buying organizations particularly as this market gets broader and the decision process gets more complicated. We actually see ourselves sort of filling that need as well. 

GD: So listen, I would think stage one for you guys at a minimum. Right? And this is what is, hey, some of these, let's, let's focus on demo automation. Right? What you guys call that, right, is that, you know, you're automating something, right? Whether it's a walk through or a video, right? However you've done it well, you know, there's training there too, just because you're, you know, you're doing it on video doesn't mean I do it right. And I've listened to myself, oh my gosh, what were you doing? Right. Like, you know, you really got to think so. I think, I think the cottage industry or the training can start there as well, Right. Is that as you have this absentee buyer that's on their own self learning And, and is that, is it, is it different than a face to face? Well, heck, yeah, it is. Right. But how does that all work? And, and so forth? And I think you're, I think you're right. And I think that then right? You guys as, as creating the guide need to also kind of, you know, figure out how you're gonna go about. I think there is a add on service or add on, you know, kind of junk here that says, hey, you know, advisory service around deployment, even if you don't pick a vendor of choice, you just said, listen, I don't care what you're doing, whether it's whatever category it is, right? I like your analogy of Salesforce, if you're, hey, we wanna use Salesforce. Oh, by the way, you know, the CFO just said, listen, our forecasting is bringing in accurately make a bunch of changes in salesforce. Guess who's gonna win? Right? The CFO's gonna get whatever they want and guess what, as soon as you get that done, they're gonna ask for 17 other things that quote unquote help, pipeline analysis. So you're kind of, You know, rolling uphill. So I think that's a great place to end it. I think, you know, that, that, that, that we will see, um, you know, six months from now or so a version two. Is that your, is that your plan? 

CW:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the reason we published it as a website and for everybody's benefit, it's, it's not a downloadable report, even though it's called, you know, the presales buyer's guide, it's a website and, and if I may, it's, it's pretty meaty there, there's a lot of information out there, we want to, we want to encourage people to take a look at it. We're actually working on something called a demo Excellence framework and, and, you know, the pillars of, of this framework are skills, process assets and what's the fourth stories, so, and stories and messaging. So there's a lot coming Greg. We, this is in the very early stages and we're excited to see where this goes next. Well, so are we? 

GD: So are we, um, listen so in in um and wrapping this thing up, right, please repeat your company's again. And also the where they, where they can find the buyer's guide, um, and there any channels for, you know, anyone that's listening today that may not have been included in version one. How do they, what's the best way to reach you? All website, whatever. Just kind of, let's put a little plug in for this, you know, for everyone on the, on this podcast listening, these two people took it upon themselves full time jobs and they said, hey, it would be helpful to go do this. Hat's off to them. It go look at it please, when they give you the address, it's not a one paragraph per 21 24 minutes. A lot of research in there and had a lot of categories, how long they've been in business, How big they are. What about their funding? What about this? What about that? You know, kind of ballpark revenue numbers, accepted what, what people would be willing to share. So it's a professional document. It's not a two peas in a pod, decided just throw this together and see if we can call it something. So I'm a user. So I my comment, So go ahead and Kerry, go ahead, take it away and introduce everyone to that and then we'll end today 

KS: Awesome appreciate that Greg. So the easiest way to find it is presalesbuyer'sguide. com And it is 100% free. We not only do not charge the vendors to participate, we do not charge for access. You have to register an account just so we know who you are, but that's literally the only gate uh and then you get immediate access to it. Um so again, presales buyer's guide dot com. It is and and just to play on chris's idea is that the reason why we did it as a website is It allows us to update the information whenever we want. One of the vendors just this week had a huge series C raise. That news was their profile was updated on the website. 15 minutes later, we felt that the problem with these downloadable reports is there immediately out of date as soon as you read them and and we wanted people to have a recurring and more up to date information. So please do check it out. Me personally. Presales mastery where you can reach me on linkedin or pre sales mastery dot com 

CW: I'm at tech sales advisors dot com. All one word and Greg. You said something about the the other vendors we want to invite any of the other vendors who have not participated to to reach out to us. If for some reason we haven't discovered you're found you yet reach out to us. We're excited to include, you know, we would love to hit the number 40 in in the next release. I don't know if we'll get 

GD: Yeah, yeah. Listen, I'm testament. They reached out to me, they didn't know about us. And you know, we were we were given an opportunity at least say who we are in the in the in the guy, which is fair right? We weren't in the in the early throws. But you know that that that that was not something he said, oh no, you didn't make the cut, You're out. You guys were accommodating. So hats off to you. Thank you both very, very much. And I think it's a great, it's a great podcast. I appreciate you taking the time and again. What a great job with the, with the, with the buying. I appreciate it. Thank you. Great to have you

Akshat Srivastava  0:52  

Greg, thank you so much for having me on this podcast. My name is Akshat Srivastava. I'm a Solutions Architect leader at AWS. And prior to this, I have worked at companies like M particle, Cisco AppDynamics, and I have been in the pre sales industry for upwards of about seven, eight years now. I AWS I manage a team of pre sales engineers, we also call them solutions architects focused on the financial services and insurance enterprise sector here in New York City. By have been in the industry because I really love this job. And the reason I love this job is because sales engineering solutions, architecture is the one field where I can put many hats on, I can be a part of the sales cycle, I can also be a part of product development, I can talk to engineering, I can talk to customer success is really the one field which allows me to stay close to my customer and impact them at the highest level possible. In July 2018, I had recently left AppDynamics from a sales engineer position, and I really loved loved my team at AppD, I loved my job. And when I when I left to join a startup, known as M particle, I was only the second kind of hire in New York area over there in the presales industry, and I was the first one they hired to actually be attached to major accounts and enterprise accounts. So here I am leaving a company where with all my friends and I was I was suddenly thrown in the in the world where I had to learn a lot of new things. And I realized that at the time in New York, there was no Meetup group, no help community, no mentor mentoring community that I could go to with questions around the challenges I'm facing in a completely new organization, right. And I realized that a lot of challenges I had faced when I started at AppDynamics, were the same kind of challenges I was facing at M particle. So it ended up happening that I used to call my friends att AppDynamics and ask them questions around how do I how do I tackle this challenge? And the challenges can be around a bunch of things that pre sales engineers have challenge challenges with such as, how do I get enabled quickly on this new product? How do I figure out the demo flow? what should be my story? How do I build champions? How do I work with the new, new account reps? I don't really know these people, how do I build trust? You get the point. There's a lot of challenges. And so I  actually did not find any any resources in New York. And I was talking to my friends at the time in the pre sales industry. And I was like, You know what, let's start a meetup community and  go around, gathering people in a bar. And just talking about pre sales in 2019. What happened is we had our first event at Salesforce offices, and one of the co founders Owen McLeod, I knew him from New York essing circles. So he joined and he was really helpful in, in getting our organization to the next level. We had we started having panel discussions and the community just took off we have a Slack channel now with about 900 people on we have the meetup group with over 1000 members. We recently had an event, at Yext headquarters thanks to Lexi Bohannon, who's heavily involved. She's the VP of pre sales at Yext and we have a lot of folks involved here shout out to Eric Glick, who's my co founder Sam Pena, who's my co founder, of course, Owen McLeod. So we're, we're really proud of where the community has come. And we have an a very active Slack channel with a bunch of discussions happening there. There's a channel called mentors. So what we're doing for the community is a lot of news. Folks who have never been in pre sales but they want to come into pre sales they can have just a question asked and mentors channel in our slack and yeah, we'll help them out. So that's a quick overview but that's...

Greg Dickinson  5:12  

thats when you found that SENY? sales engineer in New York right? And so I think, yeah, well that's how I met you know, two years ago or something my one of my associates who when I'd travel, I forget what location you were at. You always had great locations and good pizza. Right. I  moved to South Carolina about five years ago. And kind of, you know, the one thing I miss out of the New England area is pizza. Right? So I always love to hear your events and and yeah, shout out to Lexi Ron and Alexei well, and I think, you know, big advocate, and I think you, I think, you know, great for starting that, right? Because I think one of the one of the kind of areas that I want to kind of peel back the onion with you on is the fact that, you know, if you if you talk to some people, right, they view, you know, when you were talking about solution engineering, I got goosebumps tomorrow, because that's what I how I started my career, right? And I just love it, right? I mean, there's so many aspects of being able to be in front of somebody and being able to help them understand your product and be able to, you know, be that thought leadership, etc. And I think, you know, your community helps people because the job is so big, right? I mean, I, you know, I'm not going to pick on sales or inside sales or other aspects, right. But think about, you know, solution engineering excellence that I talked about all the time, and, you know, all the all the different aspects of what you need to do. And today, I think the role of social engineering is, you know, 10x, what it was when I did it in the 90s, in the early 2000s, right, because I think the product, and the product experience has become so much more important for a number of reasons, right? So have like, even seven or eight years, are you seeing like that, that that change? I mean, you created a group for mentorship. Clearly, you had some areas, I think you hit on four or five of them that you wanted to go to other people say, hey, you know, how do I do this? I mean, geez, as simple as, Hey, I got a new sales rep. How do I deal with that? Or how do I get followership? So countless people are getting a little bit on that topic for a moment, because I think that's a really cool, you know, topic for people to appreciate is the roles change, I think it's, it was always important. In my eyes. When I was solution engineer, I thought it was the most important job because it was mine, it was me, but you know, now I look at it and say, you know, it's evident, it's obvious I can, I can build, you know, many, many reasons why, what do you think?

Akshat Srivastava  7:26  

So, I mean, I mean, listen, like, there's a lot of people in the SENY community out there who are very proud of what they do. And they'll be like, Hey, this is the most important job. You know, it's a really important job. But I'm not gonna say it's the most important job in a company, because I think a lot of other jobs are also important. I think I would place it equally at the equal importance. So we need a product solid product team, we need solid engineering. We need solid sales account executives, and we need we need a good SEO team. So I would I would like to say that we are very important. Yes. But I'm not going to take it away from from other teams.

Greg Dickinson  8:03  

Oh, that's fair. Yeah, absolutely. And listen, the one thing that makes software so cool is it's a team sport, right? I mean, a lot of other industry, you can have a really great product and have everything else be bad. And it still sells right. But in software, marketing has to be good sales has to be good to practice, because social engineering has to be good. And you know, except for so I think you're right.  But I think the challenge is that you have to juggle, right are greater today. Right? Your need of excellence is is needed in more areas than it was seven years ago when you were adept at in?

Akshat Srivastava  8:35  

Yeah. I would say yes, that the industry has become more crowded, there's a lot more specialist specialist products. I mean, all my demo is one of them. Right? So from our sales engineer perspective, we really need to understand where we're lacking, and we need to leverage these products to help better our game. So in that sense, for sure, I would say it is it is more complex now. But it's also easier in terms of once you get to know how to use, you know, the products out there to help pre sales, it will become easier, as well. So in the the other thing is that it's a very competitive market now. You know, there's a lot more sales engineers as well. And there's a lot more many more products to sell, there's more competition. So with all those things that challenges, of course increase.

Greg Dickinson  9:29  

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that you know, that the product experience becomes, you know, front and center where, you know, in when I did it, right, the salesperson did their thing. They kind of held the demo hostage until they got everything they wanted, and that, you know, then there was a dud demo, and then maybe a scripted demo chapter where today. Right? You know, to your point, you and I talked a while back about your recruiting right and how that's a challenge right with with the openings that you have and so forth. And I think that's the reason there's 25,000 job openings on LinkedIn, for engineering job Just in the computer technology space, right? If you if you just search pre sales engineering, job openings are 75,000. Right across every industry. So I think, you know, that's kind of a telling point that, hey, there must be more need for right the job and more need for that. Right? I mean, are you seeing that in your role of of you having to build your team and recruit and retain and those kinds of areas is that common for you to? 

Akshat Srivastava  10:25  

Yeah, there's a lot of jobs opening, I know, we have many wrecks open in the Northeast with AWS. Obviously, if anyone's listening to this podcast and looking for pre sales job, we're hiring big time. It is a challenge, because there's a lot of people looking for a job with no pre sales experience. And it's kind of funny that we have so many pre sales positions open, and everyone's in states that states that, hey, we need a prior pre sales experience. So I would urge the hiring managers here to kind of be open to the future candidates, right, be open to mentoring, folks, if if the position is kind of a starting role, so if it's a entry level sales engineering role, I personally, would be totally fine with with hiring someone without any pre sales experience, as long as they are meeting the technical bar, they are good communicators, they understand what it takes to sell something, and they're willing to learn. Other than the other than that, I would say, a person who can work, you know, independently person who can show that they delivered results and, and and who take ownership of their work with so what I'm getting at here is we need to bridge this gap of hiring, you know, problem and the talent pool. And the reason people always complain about pre sales, not, you know, jobs, that there's there's a shortage of talent is because we're always looking for talent, who has who has some pre sales experience, I think it's it's up to us hiring managers, to, you know, be open to candidates, you know, who are open to learn.

Greg Dickinson  12:08  

Yeah, no, I'm with you. 100%. I mean, listen, when I, I got my first job at Ariba in 1997. You know, technically, I was never an enterprise sales period, I worked for a small company, a reorg computer reseller, we happen to have some eCommerce technology to help us do our job. And I was responsible for showing that right to, but yeah, we were a hardware company we sold, we were a reseller, I took my first job at Ariba. And, you know, and I learned, right, I learned from a lot of other people that had done it before I learned from their experience. And then as I hired, right, I insisted on mentoring and, and growing that team, because, you know, I mentioned the running

Akshat Srivastava  12:45  

this is a this is an emergency for the Brooklyn subway shooter.

Greg Dickinson  12:52  

Well, that's a tragedy. So let's, we'll take a moment out for that for sure. 

But I think the you know, the idea was, you know, as I ended up running all of pre sales for Rebbe, you know, the, the need to mentor, I think you're exactly right. I mean, I think I think oftentimes people look at, oh, let me see that on your resume or your CV, right? And I think you still need to look at is, hey, do they have the characteristics, right, the ability to get in front of an audience and building the list and not talk all the time, the ability to, to solve problems in a creative way, and then being able to map that back to your solution, right, as opposed to Hey, yeah, I've done this for 10 or 15 years, I think there's a, there's lots of other roles, I know. And I last thought up IPRS, there was customer success, wanted more ability to demo to their customers or do a product to their customers. And, and my organization didn't write support customers. So I wouldn't say go hire some fresh people were mental them will train them will use a lot of internal tools, which is kind of a prerequisite of omit them, right. And the idea of I can use that library to help gain knowledge internally, etc. You know, and it hats off to you at AWS, that we're at AWS shop, we use a boatload of your tools to make the ability of searching video possible. Right. And it's it without AWS, there's no minimum I can desert we get access to such great technology and innovation. But I think that's, that's let's just pivot one area. Right. So I think on the on the hiring, mentoring, the role has changed.  What is your opinion? On the you know, I'm getting ready to publish this blog that I that I wrote that I think the role of of I called solution engineering, pre sales, solution engineering, whatever it needs to be elevated a little bit right and, and not looked at as quote unquote, the demo shop, look at it more as the solution engineer, what's your thoughts on that?

Akshat Srivastava  14:44  

So can you explain a little bit more about that?

Greg Dickinson  14:47  

Yeah so my hypothesis is that the product has begun. We live in a product centric buying experience, right product, lead product, etc. is kind of more important to the buyer than it was, you know, years ago. or some some, some buyers bought SAAS products and then didn't get didn't dig in and took a lot of trust a lot of faith. And then when they ended up using the product didn't meet all their expectations. So I see now the buyer wanting to understand more about the solution. And I mean the product, what it can do, how it does and what about scalability? What about security? What about upgrading? And like all that, you know, what about the location? Right? All that is part of the product experience in my definition. And I and I think that's become very important to this product centered buyer. And therefore, you know, organizations need to look at the solution engineering department as critical to revenue as opposed to  attacks on the sales cycle. Right, the demo, I think it's beyond the demo, it's now a product experience that's kind of really pivotal to revenue generation

Akshat Srivastava  15:55  

100%, I mean, the buyer has evolved as well, for the last three years now, this is the third calendar year, we are in kind of a pandemic, where we're getting out of it, we have shifted to mostly, you know, online selling, it's changing back now. And we have realized that a lot of time, we have limited attention from the buyer, you have the buyer always Googling something, you know, your competition is out there publishing reports and whatnot. So you have a buyer, who is who has less attention span, who is busier, who has access to more data, whether it's online, whether it's reviews, so whenever you're demoing something, you better have, you know, have the best shot at the demo number one, and number two, be really careful as to what you put out there online, or in your demo. Because if you're not accurate, that can really be you know, that can really come out really soon. So, in that sense, right? You're absolutely right, that we are going towards the product. You know, that buying experience.

Greg Dickinson  17:01  

Okay, cool. Good. Hey, so, um, emotionally, I think we'll just circle right back. Right. We're kind of at the end of the at the time. And I think you know, I think for those that have not are in the in the Northeast in general, right, I think you need to check out the s&p why. And I'll tell you why. When I first started working with AWS, right, we built momentum from the ground up. I used to go to coffee shops and lofts, except for the AWS hosted right, and I was able to gain, you know, kind of walk in and there'll be some smart person sitting there to answer my questions. And, and then I can also sit there and listen to other people's smart questions and smart answers, right. And I think you really are able to, that's a great attribute that AWS has put into practice what they call them officially, it's been a while since I've been but but I used to go to them all the time. My CTO lives in Queens, and he used to hustle over and be able to sit through and you know, in these these loft type things are these coffee hour things. I think what you've done with SME, why's the same thing, right? It's this idea of, of bringing people together. It's non, you know, competitive in nature, just hey, you know, how do you how do you up your game? How do you get better at this? How do you fix this problem, right? And people are willing, your meetings are always great. So you know, I just want to thank you for doing that. And I want people to you realize that community is kind of important, right? It takes a team, it's a team effort to get and your team doesn't have to nearly be all in your team, reach out right and be able to pay it forward and help other people because I promise you if you're in this career, there's going to come a day when you're gonna go, Gosh, I wish I had the answer to this or is there a better way or a different way? Right. Am I speaking the gospel hear?

Akshat Srivastava  18:43  

Absolutely. You are. Yeah, I was smiling the whole time.

Greg Dickinson  18:46  

Great. Super. Hey, thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Any closing remarks to the audience that you want to give a shout out to as people listen to this. We're right on target for time. So you got a few seconds, anything else?

Akshat Srivastava  19:01  

That said you've covered everything, I just want to say thank you to everyone who is part of SENY and thank you to Doug for connecting me with you, Greg. And I always appreciate Doug being at our events and we are happy to partner with Omedym.

Greg Dickinson  19:17  

Great, thank you. Let's talk soon

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

1. Engage your clients by offering insights and by leading with a problem.
2. The IT world doesn't wait for you. If you fail to improve daily, you fall back.
3. Creativity, boldness, and the unexpected are the best client experiences.

To begin with number one, Patrick explains how it is no longer efficient enough for sales leaders to say, "yes, we do a demo training and my team is equipped and they are good salesmen". You must craft your niche and evangelize your company's category. Patrick believes in finding out and building the company's internal pillars, or values before going into the market. Questions he suggests asking internally are: How do we treat our clients? How do we treat our Account Executive's?  How do we create a niche? 

The next piece of advice is to make sure you are continuously trying to improve each day. One way to do this is by using LinkedIn and other social media platforms in order to break the ice between the salesperson and the potential customer. He suggests going online and answering questions you ask yourself such as, "What do you think? What're your problems? What're your customer's problems? What are you solving? What is your domain expertise? What are stories of different trends or things you've seen fail?". These questions will help you build thought leadership because every client that researches you can then look through and find your gems of good ideas. You can then actually have the potential customer read what you are thinking by posts on LinkedIn before the meeting takes place, which ultimately builds a familiarity upfront. This gives you a deal cycle that that's highly flexible, which is vital since the sales cycle is no longer linear.

Lastly, creativity, boldness, and the unexpected are far better client experiences than a filled request for proposal document or lengthy custom demo. Also, if you understand your company's positioning, your client's business, your product's vision, and your mind – you won't face competition. Patrick advises you to be bold and just trying everything possible, he says, "if you fail, you fail, nobody will actually see it, but the upside is unlimited. So I would recommend just try it, do it".

Patrick's bottom line is, your job is not just to show up and present software, your job is an integral role in the sales cycle. You must think and act out of the box in order to differentiate yourself and sway away from being "just the norm". 

His first book teaches salespeople how to develop a way more collaborative approach in dealing with those challenges. Fred's latest book, 'Hybrid Selling', explores how salespeople can use a complete approach to drive opportunities in the new world of sales.  Fred discusses the certain things that salespeople need to do in order to use this complete approach and he illustrates those tasks through the 'EVOLVE' framework. The elements of this EVOLVE framework are:

•  Essentials
• Virtual selling
• Opportunity management
• Leading customers
• Value selling
• Expanding the relationship

His goal with this framework is to put in bits of his advice and knowledge into each of the essentials. Fred believes you must actually break stuff down into smaller parts, and deliver it in little chunks that people can implement. He has restructured sales training not only around these smaller chunks but how you can drive the implementation. A huge factor in driving the implementation is what Fred calls, 'box step'.  It helps you take the information learned in training and use it properly. 

Not only do they discuss insights from his books, but Fred and Greg both acknowledge the fact that there are not as many face to face meetings, or time in front of customers nowadays. They agree that, consequentially, salespeople are forced to approach sales in a different way. Fred expounds on the specific skills and tactics needed for salespeople to continue to work, despite this difference. They analyze how these changes affect the sales world and contribute to the convenience economy we have today.

A massive gap exists in what sellers know about who the buyers are, what's important to them, and how they're going to make decisions. Sales is not one size fits all and 80% of sellers do not identify everybody involved in the buying decisions. So, there is a lot of groundwork that salespeople need to do. Shortcut selling does not help.

So how do you bring about a more buyer centric approach? 

First, you focus on buyer enablement. Buyer enablement is about providing the right information at the right time to help with the job or task at hand for each buyer. To achieve this, you must begin to understand more about the buyers, the buyer personas, and each person involved in a typical decision for what you are trying to sell. Kevin acknowledges that a team usually decides collectively, however, everyone on that team is an individual with their own opinions and concerns. The goal is to make that experience more relevant to them as individuals and as organizations. Just as sales enablement helps sellers sell, buyer enablement helps buyers buy. 

When you begin to think about the buyers as individuals, you are enabling a more buyer centric approach. If sellers bridge the gap between the buyer and seller and become more mindful of the buying requirement, they can turn previous losses into wins and those no decisions into wins as well.  

John is a big believer that to be a good salesperson, you should take a lot of time in high school or college or whenever you can, to figure out where you fit best. The reason for this is that if you do not take the time to think about what you like to do and how you can try aligning yourself to that, then there's a chance you will be unhappy at your job.   
 

He recommends investing in yourself and you can do that by following these two things in specific. 

1. The first is, particularly for the people who want to be salespeople and his advice is to remember to take time to think about yourself, and your plan. Instead of just focusing on today, look at the big picture, and ask yourself, what do I need to add? What does my skill stack look like? It would be advantageous to schedule time on your calendar to view what your career is looking like.
2. The other thing is to visit noobschool.org for more resources such as videos, his podcast, as well as a new president's club where salespeople can join and help each other out.

John also advises those who are looking for a sales job to figure out what trade show they would hypothetically like to go to every year for the next 20 years. He suggests finding a way to get into that ideal space where you're hanging around what you love. 

Paul points out that discovery has been changing over the past 10 years - from simply asking questions and collecting facts to guiding the conversation to help the prospect think about what is possible. 

So how can you achieve proper discovery? Through questions.  Specifically, here are Peter's  three steps in discovery: 

1. The first step in discovery is to is to understand the problem space. 
2. The second step is to understand the prospects current vision of a solution. 
3. The third step is to teach and help people understand how to probe that vision of the solution, the prospects vision, and expand it and rework it. If you re-engineer their vision with a bias towards the capabilities 

 20 years ago it was unheard of for companies to develop their employees in presales. Instead, they were put into sales methodology training with the sales folks, and that was it. Now, people realize that there are skill sets having to do with discovery and The Second Derivative - The Great Demo! is able to help you accomplish that.

And this digital trust is not gained in a one hour zoom meeting.  It occurs when you curate your own digital thought leadership and by cultivating your personal brand.  Ken believes sales people can accomplish this by following what he referred to as 5 3 2.  Each number corresponding to the number of online posts made.

• 5 posts about your industry, solution, and your prospects’ peers.
• 3 posts about your product/solution, the success it has brought to your customers, and the role you played.
• 2 posts that are personal and give people an opportunity to get to know you.  And on this point, Kenneth emphasizes not to be afraid to put yourself out there. 

Connect:

Connect with Kenneth on LinkedIn and learn more about Sales Xceleration by visiting https://salesxceleration.com/.

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

Stephen also understands that the people he is marketing to are changing.  The way they learn and want to consume content is just different!  People like video.  People like to self-learn.  They will go where they need and do NOT want to talk to sales.  So to get prospects into the mix, meeting prospects where they “are” is about making it easy for them and yes, giving up control.  Check this out.  Stephen and his team hold leads until he is sure they are qualified.  A marketer holding leads.  Unheard of! 

So how is he driving awareness and growth for Buurst?  Through video and making it accessible.  Stephen says “Buurst is a massive video company.  With a library of over 250 videos.”  Video is so much easier than writing a white paper.  That is what led Stephen and Buurst to Omedym.  People want to educate themselves and no one wants to talk to sales.  How can prospects buy if they don’t want to talk to sales.  But with over 250 videos that creates it owns challenge.  So, Stephen needed to figure out how to share the video content without it becoming too much.  His answer is Omedym.  Giving prospects the ability to self-learn in a really convenient way.  And while the prospect is self-learning, so is Buurst.  They get to see what questions are asked, what people are interested in, and how engaged they are.  That goes back to holding back leads from sales until Stephen and his team knows they are really interested! 

Connect:

Connect with Stephen on LinkedIn and learn more about Buurst by visiting https://www.buurst.com/.

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

So what are the keys to storytelling.  The most effective presentation hits an argument in three ways: Ethos (Heart), Logos (Brain), and Pathos (Gut).  Ethos: Establishing authority to speak on the subject and that you are trustworthy.  Appeal to the heart and be relatable. Logos: The numbers.  The value.  The logic of the argument if you will.  Pathos: The one BIG idea.  This is where you appeal to a person's emotions.  For example, you will be able to sell more stuff through your existing sales team.  And this is where you really need to know your audience.  Use these three to craft a story/message that will appeal to your audience.  Use one and you won't b effective, use two and you might be OK, but three is the best.  And remember, the most successful demo is the one where the customer can imagine themselves in it!

In a nutshell, here is the storyline:  Other people have had a similar problem.  Here is how they solved it.  Maybe that could work for you.

Connect:

Connect with James on LinkedIn and be sure to check out one of his whiteboard presentations.  They are great!

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

And this is not just pomp and circumstance.  Comes & Zeyben is all about delivering results.  97% attendance.  95% retention.  100% repeat.  Millions in pipeline.  Decision maker involvement.

Steve's closing comments are always search for new ways to engage with prospects and customers and remember that usually requires a new mindset.

It is important to note that predictive analytics does not tell us the future!  People will still need to be involved in the interpretation.  What is exciting is that the next step is what is described as Prescriptive Analytics.  Prescriptive Analytics can tell us what will happen and then tell us what you can do to change the outcome!  Coming back to Big Data.    The more we know about the history the more accurate the predictions.  That is why companies should have a strategy for what they are doing with all the data they collect.

So how does this apply to sales?  Imagine what you can do with all the data being tracked about each prospect.  Just like Othot helps universities determine who is most likely to enroll, predictive analytics in sales can help determine who is most likely to buy your solution.  And the more data you are collecting about your prospects all the way through to closed won or closed loss, the more fuel for your models.

And consider the impact this has on resource allocation.  People can apply their time to those opportunities and in turn become more productive.

John's message is clear - Go do this now - predictive and prescriptive will change the way we work.  Get out ahead of this.  Have a strategy.  Start to understand.  Collect the data.  And lastly, if you have kids, encourage them to get into data science. 

And don’t worry, one of the biggest myths - that Predictive Analytics will take over our jobs is not true.  Predictive Analytics will be a lot like reporting.  It will augment decisions.  It is like saber analytics in baseball.   

Connect:

Connect with John LinkedIn and learn more about Othot by visiting www.othot.com.

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

Salesflare created a CRM solution for sales people, not their managers, that is designed to help sales people sell and minimize data entry by automatically pulling info from places like email applications, social platforms, or website engagement.  Their entire focus is on letting sales people do what they love doing - selling, and not wasting time entering data.  And in the process, they use artificial intelligence to prioritize activities and ensure things don’t fall through the cracks. 

As you look to compete, in this hyper-competitive SaaS environment, either as a software provider or as a salesperson, take two lessons away from Jeroen and Salesflare's success:

1. From a product management perspective, focus on people wanting to use your solution because it truly helps them do their job or the corollary, chose applications for internal use so that your people that help them do their jobs.
2. Hire people that still understand the value of empathy and relationships, even in this virtual world of ours, and that are super organized.

Connect:

Connect with Jeroen LinkedIn and learn more about Salesflare by visiting www.salesflare.com.

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

Connect:

Connect with Rinus on LinkedIn and learn more about Particle.io by visiting Particle.io.

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

1. DATA - Two main categories here. 
   1.  Buyer data, if and when you have it.  This can come by leveraging innovative tools to identify who the potential buyers are (e.g. Smart Links for LinkedIn Sales Navigator) and where they might be in the buying cycle and their interests (e.g. Bombora's Intent Data.) This data can also come from more traditional ways like company and industry research.
   2. Call Performance data about the person making the calls.  This is what Steve refers to as Conversation Intelligence.  Data gleaned from recording calls that will guide coaching.  This is what Steve refers to a Game Tape. 
2. COACHING - Again back to data - the data show that coaching changes things dramatically.  The key here is to coach activity-level first, quality second.  But since the coach can longer walk the floors, you also need to have the right technology in place to track both activity levels and quality.
3. PRACTICE - Bottom line is that you have five minutes, tops, to engage your prospect.  The first five minutes is the moment of truth.  You will fail if that initial engagement fails.  The answer is you need to practice having the right conversation.  And let's be clear - this is not role playing, this is practicing by playing on the field.

Steve and Greg also talked about Steve's FREE Call Camps, something everyone responsibility for demand generation should attend.

Connect:

Connect with Steve on LinkedIn and learn more about Leaders Fund by visiting www.leaders.vc.

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

To adapt, SaaS companies have to make it easy and convenient for prospects to get the information they want - not what they think they need.  To help buyers buyer (buyer enablement) software companies must make it easy to engage, easy to access and find relevant information for each individual buyer, easy to refer a colleague, and easy to do business.

Connect:

Connect with Steve on LinkedIn and learn more about Leaders Fund by visiting www.leaders.vc.

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

1.       Build owned digital channels (e.g. website) that offer prospects a way to get answers and find information quickly and without friction. 

2.       Find their way into earned digital channels like crowd-sourced review sites by creating positive experiences throughout the customer journey - marketing, sales, implementation, and support, that customers want to share.

Since marketing is the start of the journey, less emphasis should be placed on getting names or MQLs and more effort should be put into creating positive experiences that respect people's limited time.

Connect:

Connect with Clark on LinkedIn and make sure to join his session at RevTech on January 27th!

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

Connect:

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn and check out HireIQ's website.

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

Connect:

Connect with James on LinkedIn and check out the PreSales Collective's website.

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

Connect:

Connect with Nick on LinkedIn and check out FunnelVision's website.

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

• How many demos will shift to self-service, on-demand content?
• How many in-person onsite demos will be required to get a deal done?
• How do you help prepare both the buyer and your pre-sales team, early on, when they buyer does not want to engage yet?
• How do we confront the rising Cost of Sales/Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)?
• What can we do to accelerate the pipeline when engagement is so hard?
• How do you measure pre-sales effectiveness?

These type of questions are leading to more and more discussions around innovation, convenience, and effectiveness.  Software companies are learning that their prospects want to make decisions on their own.  This has introduced the concept of Product-Led Growth - letting prospects experience what it is like to use the software.  For relatively simple to use products, this has led to Freemiums and Free Trials.  But for more complex, enterprise solutions, this is typically not an option, but that does not change the buyers' desire to learn about a product and see a product before talking to sales.  Tailored solution demos are part of the answer. 

Buyers want a streamlined, simple process. So do sellers.  As software providers, we have a really important role in making this happen. 

Connect:

Connect with Leah on LinkedIn and check out DocuSign's website DocuSign.

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

Connect:

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn. 

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

Connect:

Connect with Joe on LinkedIn and check out his SecuPi's website.

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

Connect:

Connect with Billy on LinkedIn and check out his Chatfunnel’s website.

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter

Connect:

Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn and check out his website LegalSifter.

Connect with Greg  on LinkedIn and check out Omedym’s website and their LinkedIn and Twitter