The Convenience Economy Podcast

Greg Dickinson
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Entrepreneurship

Welcome to The Convenience Economy Podcast, where we discuss how the buyer's journey has changed the way B2B software is acquired and how B2B companies are adopting or getting left behind!

  1. 07/11/2022

    The Four Major Hurdles in the Buying Process

    You can contact Sarah directly on her website and visit Omedym for more webinars, blogs, podcasts and content to help your business succeed.  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 g

    The Four Major Hurdles in the Buying Process

  2. 06/27/2022

    How Leading a Sales Team Effectively Can Change the Trajectory of Your Business

    Greg Dickinson  0:09   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

    How Leading a Sales Team Effectively Can Change the Trajectory of Your Business

  3. 06/20/2022

    Meet with the writers of The Presales Buyer's Guide

    https://presalesbuyersguide.com  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

    Meet with the writers of The Presales Buyer's Guide

  4. 06/14/2022

    Inside the mind of a sales engineer at AWS and founder of Sales Engineers of New York

    Greg Dickinson  0:21   So welcome, everyone to the convenience factor Podcast. Today Akshat is my guest. And it's really exciting to talk to him. He's been in the solution engineering space for a very long time. It's kind of his career. Akshat just want to just introduce yourself to the audience real quick and kind of walk us through what you're doing today, and maybe a little bit about your past would be really helpful to kind of set the context for our conversation.   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 r

    Inside the mind of a sales engineer at AWS and founder of Sales Engineers of New York

  5. 05/09/2022

    How To Lead Your Client With The Unexpected

    Patrick bestows us with some "out of the box" advice in addition to opening our eyes to a new perspective of sales. The 3 pieces of advice that he assures will differentiate a salesperson are: Engage your clients by offering insights and by leading with a problem.The IT world doesn't wait for you. If you fail to improve daily, you fall back.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".

    How To Lead Your Client With The Unexpected

  6. 04/26/2022

    Training: The Collaborative Approach Your Sales Team Needs

    Fred's multitude of experiences have led him to be understanding of the many challenges salespeople face. On this episode, he discusses the books he has written and how they are geared to help salespeople.  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:  EssentialsVirtual sellingOpportunity managementLeading customersValue sellingExpanding the relationshipHis 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.

    Training: The Collaborative Approach Your Sales Team Needs

  7. 09/20/2021

    SaaS Companies Sell Change, But Won't Adapt How They Sell

    Kevin focuses on the irony of salespeople constantly selling change; despite the sales industry being the most reluctant group of people to change. He explains that salespeople have a very fixed way of doing things and they see things in a very seller centric way.  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.

    SaaS Companies Sell Change, But Won't Adapt How They Sell

  8. 08/30/2021

    Great Career Advice for Salespeople in 20 Minutes

    John's goal of his book is not to teach readers the specifics of selling such as how to close the deal or how to find a new lead, he instead aims to teach the characteristics of how to be a good salesperson. Throughout this episode, you will gain valuable insight regardless of your status as a salesperson. 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.  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.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.

    Great Career Advice for Salespeople in 20 Minutes
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Welcome to The Convenience Economy Podcast, where we discuss how the buyer's journey has changed the way B2B software is acquired and how B2B companies are adopting or getting left behind!

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