Mark Petruzzi, Paul Melchiorre: Selling the Cloud

All great salespeople consciously develop five qualities that all begin with the letter “C”.

Curiosity
Creativity
Credibility
Communication
Courage

Passion and Mindset

Rather than being associated with disingenuous tactics, sales is increasingly associated with drive, determination and high emotional intelligence levels. Success in sales requires a certain level of natural inclination, resilience and — perhaps most importantly — passion. The future demands salespeople who are resilient, passionate and genuinely invested in serving their customers.

Stocks of successful cloud software companies like Salesforce Workday and Adobe are trading for 11-18 times revenue.

No matter how high the stakes are, our business is not about money; it is about people. Our profession is listening, learning and positioning our solutions in a way that benefits the people we serve.

You will spend over 1/3 of your life working, so make it something you are passionate about doing. The future of enterprise software sales has a growth mindset. In other words, book smarts and natural talent are just the tip of the iceberg. The true differentiator is being willing to lean in, learn and overcome adversity. Sales is a lifestyle. The best salespeople have a style all their own. In the sales market of the future, those who tune into their own sense of humor, creativity and charisma will rise to the top of the pack.

You need passion to thrive in sales because you will hear “no” more often than “yes”.

You may not be aware of this truth: the relationship you have with yourself is the blueprint that governs your relationship with others. Top performing leaders seek solutions while they average performers seek comfort.

Velocity and Grit

Feeling a spark for sales might land you the job or get you the meeting, but a solid commitment to the grind is what will help your career sustainably grow.

Those who are willing to consistently take action to maintain the velocity and grit to keep going when challenging times arise have the opportunity to actualize the most fulfilling and prolific sales careers to have existed.

Most sales methodologies are basically the same. Similar to implementation methodologies for software, there are many methodology versions, but they all boil down to common pillars. When it comes down to it, it is not the methodologies that drive success. Instead, it is good leadership, a consistent process and the intuition of hardworking human beings.

Many sales are won and lost during the discovery stage. If you cannot understand your customer’s issues and pain points and match what you have to offer to their needs, you will not be able to differentiate your product and service in a meaningful way.

When you have a pipeline of solid opportunities, you can confidently disqualify opportunities that are not good fits early on in the process. A full pipeline is worthless if it isn’t filled with quality opportunities. In baseball, you get three strikes. In sales, you get one.

When you enter a meeting prepared and demonstrate expertise out of the gate, you establish immediate credibility. Make sure you know the goal of your meeting.

You have one shot at making a first impression with a prospect, and you never know what piece of information or insider knowledge will help set you apart.

“Salespeople need to change the conversation from pitching to co-creating value with the customer or for the customer”. – Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and CEO of Selling Power

Part of the velocity and grit that it takes to succeed in sales — especially the hypergrowth sales world of tomorrow — includes getting comfortable with an endlessly accelerating pace of change.

The most successful team members are focused, driven and embody “the triple threat”: technical acumen, business savvy and emotional intelligence.

Sameness results in stagnation and as the saying goes: “Activity creates more activity which in turn creates results”.

In today’s sales environment, prospects have information at their fingertips. Salespeople are more like guides than salesmen.

People who gravitate towards sales often like to be in the spotlight, but that characteristic is not necessarily key today. True sales leadership is about putting other people and other people’s needs in the spotlight.

We in the SaaS marketplace live in a world where clients are always moving along a continuum from activation to migration. The reality is, if your customer is not actively using your tool and benefiting from it, they are getting closer to migrating every day.

Prospects want to be led, they want a lighthouse, they need to understand the vision and it is our jobs as salespeople to step up and be that guiding light. It takes creativity to create an effective narrative to excite clients short – term and keep their confidence long – term.

Empathy

You can have the most logical list of reasons why someone should buy from you, but ultimately your prospect will likely base their decision on your ability to appeal to their emotions.

Salespeople who have the ability to truly listen and understand the customer and the industry will have the ability to be knowledgeable and problem solve in a meaningful way. Listening well requires brushing up on active listening skills:

Be present
Paraphrase often
Focus outside, not inside
Try thinking aloud

Respectful listening has three levels:

Get Data
Get Context
Acknowledge

One of the defining traits of being an empathetic salesperson who actively listens is to continually ask yourself how you can better serve the person you are interacting with.

Leading in the sales world of tomorrow requires approaching sales as a service, not a one-time transaction.

Maya Angelou’s famous quote: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”, is applicable here. The best way to make your prospects and customers feel good is to be consistently authentic, credible, reliable and humble.

Work for the person, not the company. Working for someone you respect and learn from is key to job happiness and success.

IT’S EASIER TO SELL ASPIRIN THAN VITAMINS – In sales, you should always be solving a business problem. Know your prospect’s pain points and offer a solution that helps solve them. Your prospects want tangible solutions to the problems they face every day, not a promise of a potential solution that you think they need.

The larger the deal, the more complicated the sales cycle. Every time a deal dies, celebrate… you are getting closer! The right fits will work out in the end with consistent and determined effort.

Authenticity

When you are genuine and understand your customer’s pain points, you come across as a trusted advisor, not a salesperson chasing a commission.

Authenticity means doing everything with pure intentions, being unafraid to be vulnerable and take risks and being open. This approach will not only help you win deals, it will also give you peace of mind and fulfillment.

Knowing your Why means understanding what you stand for and what matters most to you. Beyond that, it means living in alignment with that understanding.

When an executive is buying a transformational technology, they want to know the values of the company they are buying from.

“No” can help train us to become the type of salesperson we want to be: a salesperson with integrity, honesty and truly productive relationships with his or her clients. The key is to learn from every “no” and to keep in touch with prospects after “no”.

Do not burn bridges. The sales world is smaller than you think.

Focus on quality over quantity. A full pipeline is worthless if it is full of low-quality opportunities. Pursuing a lead is time consuming. Always analyze a lead before investing a firm’s resources to chase it.

TOP TIPS FOR AUTHENTICITY by BILL CAMPBELL:

Don’t assume your employees automatically respect you because you’re the boss.
Do what’s right, even if it’s unpopular.
It’s not about you, it’s about the team.
Care about courage and getting things done more than egos and IQs.
The aggregate is more powerful than anything you can come up with alone.
Ask for the best ideas, not consensus.
Park your ego.
Life and business are team sports.
A great player makes the team stronger, not the stand-out player.
Leaders are completely there in everything they do.
Treat everyone with dignity, even in failure.
Always be available.

Creativity and Problem Solving

A whole new world of sales success will become available to you when you stop focusing on making sales and instead on solving problems.

Modern neurological research finds that storytelling triggers the release of Oxytocin (often called the “trust hormone”). Oxytocin plays a significant role in social bonding.

Storytelling is a business, selling, and life superpower. Invest the time to learn to do it to the best of your ability.

Eileen Voynick believes that being creative does not equate to artistic genius or outlandish ideas; instead, creativity is the embodiment of innovative problem solving. Thomas Edison once said, “Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility and utility is success”. To Voynick, creative thinking in sales and leadership works when it connects inventive ideas with something that is valuable and useful.

Growing with current customers is a strategy many leaders overlook. Many business leaders do not invest enough in customer success or growing their revenue from their current client base.

Consider the three primary drivers of modern business: people, process and technology. You have to be creative and innovative around each of these tenets to even have a chance of building a successful cloud software business today.

Resilience

We need a system of selling in which the objective of selling is to get the customer what the customer wants.

Closers are the most highly recruited and sought after — the true elite. However, most of us don’t even like to be considered salespeople — much less closers!

Complex sales; Intangible services/complicated physical products; Long-term relationships; High risk and high return; High degrees of technical competence required by seller. Do any of these situations sound familiar to you? If so, you are likely in the enviable position of never needing to close.

Professional buyers — no matter how good the selling is — will buy when (and only when) it is appropriate for them to buy.

The process of closing uses up a great deal of “Trust Capital”. Trust Capital is what you generate throughout the sales cycle that will allow you to win.

Campbell believes that trust is lost when pressuring a prospect into a close. He instead finalizes a sale by ensuring that every question that could be asked by the prospect is answered and every step of the decision process is fulfilled.

The reality is, as salespeople, we have a pretty simple job. We have ongoing conversations with potential buyers. Periodically, those conversations trigger a commercial event. The commercial event — the sale — is grossly over-celebrated. In reality, the “sale” is simply one event among many equally important events.

The only reason to track “closed” sales is to generally know if we are getting it right (i.e., are we getting better at this or worse over time).

Move something forward each day. Success in sales is all about continuing to do the work, day after day and making moves toward your goals, even if they are small moves.

Trust

Flyers and bullet points position you as a salesperson. Good questions and stories position you as a resource.

It is important to note, you will not achieve intimacy with every prospect and customer, and that is OK. The most trust filled relationships require chemistry, time and countless interactions.

No one is perfect, and there will be times in your sales career where you are not able to deliver what you promised. When this happens, owning your mistakes and being honest is a great way to earn trust.

SIX STEPS TO TAKE AFTER TRUST VIOLATION

Acknowledge
Address Feelings
Get Support, ask for help or delegate
Take Responsibility for Your Part
Appreciate Forgiveness
Move on and Learn

Always be honest. Little inconsistencies add up to broken trust, and broken trust has a cost.

When you don’t know something, say so: 95% of sales reps will make up an answer when asked a question to which they don’t know the answer.

Trust-Based Go-To Market Models

We believe the three most powerful sales strategies in our space today are:

private equity go-to-market strategy,
customer success and
consulting partnerships/strategic alliances.

We were both early adopters of the strategic alliance ecosystem pioneered by Klaus Besier (previous President and CEO of SAP America, Inc.) in the 80s.

Channel sales/strategic alliances are effective because they allow you to scale at a much faster rate than through an internal direct sales team alone.

Key examples of types of partners you can form strategic alliances with:

IMPLEMENTATION CONSULTANCIES
STRATEGY CONSULTANCIES
TECHNICAL ALLIANCES
DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS

Established private equity companies often have a large number of companies within their portfolio. When software companies align themselves with those private equity companies, they gain access to their portfolio and the operating executives at each of those companies.

They spend their days driving new processes and business strategies that increase enterprise business value across the PE portfolio. In years past, their work focused mainly on financial re-engineering and cost cutting. Today, they are also tasked with driving growth for companies within the portfolio.

The combination of the high-talent operating partners with the value cloud software solutions offer creates an ideal environment to sell cloud software products and services on a scale once thought impossible.

Partnerships are the most lucrative when they are long term. That is why it is important to identify partners with aligned values, compatible sales processes and a working knowledge of your product over time. Choose partners that fill a gap in your offering, or you fill a gap in theirs that their customer demands.

Klaus is a 35-year titan of enterprise software sales. Besier is well known for his role as President and CEO of SAP America. When SAP came to the U.S. from its home country of Germany, it was clear to Klaus that it would be a huge success. He had a plan to quickly forge an inside track with the business elite of America. The inside track was large accounting and consulting firms.

Klaus also drove one of the earliest fully focused industry vertical models. It coordinated well with the way his accounting and consulting partners went to market. SAP scaled in record time.

There are still companies that feel that only their company can implement their product or solution. Klaus believes that that kind of us-against-them mentality will lead to obsolescence.

Be honest about where you can add value and where you can’t.

Hiring Right

Effectively leading a sales team requires perfecting a balance between exerting pressure and getting out of your team’s way.

In 2014, and revalidated in 2020, Target Training International (TTI) published groundbreaking research that linked one of six intrinsic motivators as most important to the top salespeople in both the U.S. and Europe. They established it is the motivation/internal drive to achieve results that is most impactful.

Over the years, we have used the DISC Assessment personality classifications of:

D – Dominant,
I – Influence,
S – Steadiness and
C – Compliant,

to help us determine our team member’s styles.

Type of sales persons:

THE TECHNICIAN – This is the sales rep that has read all the sales books and attended every sales training session they can attend. On the DISC assessment, this individual usually scores a high C, high S and reasonably high D.
THE NATURAL – The Natural has an innate ability to connect with and influence others. The Natural is usually a combination of a high D and I on the DISC assessment.
THE SUPERSTAR – The Superstar is highly intelligent, driven, process-oriented and naturally able to connect with and influence others. On the DISC assessment they score high on I.
MS. OR MR. RELIABLE – These are the real professionals in our business. They have the right mix of people skills (I) combined with extremely productive sales processes and systems (S).
THE PROFESSOR – The Professor has many of the same behavioral attributes of The Technician but are not usually the stronger sales performer. These individuals do have the foundation to become a Reliable, with proper mentoring.
THE EXPERT These are the folks who are extremely brilliant and they know it. With clients who appreciate their styles, they can be your greatest sales asset. With clients who don’t, they can be your biggest nightmare.

The natural “door openers” are the Faux Superstar, the Natural, the Superstar and Ms. Reliable. Their styles naturally attract them to people, especially to others who are like them. Once the door is opened, the Planner is needed to structure and manage the engagement. The Technician understands the nuances of the software and can answer the clients detailed questions about the application. The Professor can address client’s requests for customization capabilities. The Expert can be brought in when challenges arise by bridging the macro/micro views of the situation and how to remediate it.

Diversity in your sales team is beneficial in multiple ways; it boosts performance, fosters team innovation and is linked to increased sales and profits.

Customer Success

Customer Success as a business discipline began in the early 2000s due to the shift from contract-based software sales to the SaaS pricing model. Customer success is responsible for earning additional recurring revenue from existing customers. They work to improve customer retention (also referred to as reduced churn), grow revenue and improve customer satisfaction and experience.

Customer Success Managers (CSMs). CSMs focus their time on building relationships with existing clients. Their goal is to align client objectives with the growth of the software company.

CSMs are the main point of contact on client accounts. They cover the responsibilities of traditional account managers/project managers/technical account managers, but their responsibilities are primarily focused on generating long-term value to customers.

Bain Research interviewed 70 customer success leaders at top tech companies about the most important aspects of their jobs and their performance in those areas. The top performers reported the keys to their success as a positive attitude, ability to work well with others, tendency to be big-picture thinkers and ability to help customers help themselves.

Make your customers the heroes of your company story. Without this level of customer advocacy, it becomes extremely difficult to sustain the rule of 40, even for the most productive selling organizations.

Since our customers have more options than ever before, if we do not deliver a positive customer experience, we will lose customers.

Maria Martinez, served as Salesforce’s first Global Leader of Customer Success. Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight’s enlightening book Customer Success.

According to Martinez, customer experience is the end-to-end customer journey, and Customer Success is a component of customer experience.

Be customer obsessed. Have a deep knowledge of your customer, it is the best way to accelerate their success.

Technologies: Sales Stack

We have talked a lot in this book about the importance of humanity in the future of sales. Trust. Empathy. Creativity. Authenticity. Passion. These are all deeply human traits. It’s true that most sales decisions are emotional.

The sky’s the limit when you have powerful technology, well-designed processes, and talented people.

Think of your CRM and any other tech tools you use as a combination of a mentor and administrative assistant.

A Bain survey found that high-growth companies have more effective data and analytics capabilities and deploy 25% more digital tools with wider adoption than low-growth companies.

McKinsey found that digital leaders in B2B sales achieve up to five times the revenue growth and up to eight times the earnings of their peers before interest and taxes, but only one in three companies has deployed digital solutions at scale.

Sales organizations are beginning to apply AI in a variety of areas ranging from administrative applications to sales forecasting and messaging:

Automate Administrative Tasks
Evaluate Deals
Prospect
Forecast
Craft your Messaging

You cannot look smart with bad numbers. No matter what impressive narrative you spin, numbers speak for themselves.

Now that truly virtual sales teams are the new normal, we are learning even more about how to deliver this virtual salesforce as a service in ways that far outpace brick-and-mortar, traditional sales approaches.

Virtual salesforce success starts with a hyper-segmentation of your target market, well thought-out sales technology design and integration and exceptional training for the inside and/or virtual selling representatives. The rest is virtual selling history.