Male in Leadership Role in High Tech Sales...AMA

[Listen]

I offered up some personality mirroring advice in another thread and it was mentioned I should post some of those tips and learnings in here.

I started selling newspaper subscriptions door to door when I was 10 and have now have had at-least a Director title for the past 8 years.

I’ve had to take a handful of company paid sales trainings from over the years, from Sandler and others and am more than willing to help any Coli brehs with progressing through the ranks.

Let me know what would be helpful to share.

 

[killacal]

Negged

 

[Listen]

Negged

Breh,...

 

[bnew]

Negged

 

[Secure Da Bag]

What are some good ways to negotiate a raise or promotion?

 

[Listen]

What are some good ways to negotiate a raise or promotion?

Good one.

Sales is a total “what have you done for me lately” business, so EVERY time you win a deal that puts you in the lime lite, you leverage that for you.

Example:

Company I am at now, there are 7 sales people all struggling to hit their number. This one sales guy who does a bit better than the others, but still doesn’t hit his goals.....after every nice new deal/logo he brings on....he complains that he’s underpaid, under appreciated and that he’s going to have to start looking unless they can convince him to stay lmao.

He is CONSTANTLY aware of the value he brings to the company and uses every second of leverage to sweeten his total package. Base salary increases, lower targets, higher comp %, more stock options etc.

You also need to a person on the inside. AKA, you need to know what the budget for the role is, the budget for the team, and the expense they incur if they try to replace you and your production. You add in salary data from Glassdoor and the like to your mix too.

You have to have the story of your worth, ready to go, as soon as you have the leverage.

 

[Cynic]

What's your hiring process like for new staff...

How many coldcalls did you make when you started ...

What's craziest objection you've heard on the phone ?

What's your current method for client acquisition... Email/Coldcalls/Direct mail/"networking" ?

Since you are in high tech ...what are your thoughts on Jelurida and Factom ?

 

[Listen]

What's your hiring process like for new staff..

Most of the time you have a process to go through that starts with getting the approval to hire the role and defining what the role is, who they would report to, and budgeted amount. Next step would be to ask around into my network and see if I had anyone I knew or someone else knew anyone they could recommend while posting the listing on Linkedin and Indeed. Usually have the HR person vet applicants, then do a phone interview with ones before I or anyone else would get involved. You usually give HR a few of the red flags you don't want so they can screen them.

If HR says thumbs up, usually have you come in for a meeting with myself and at least one other person above or below me to maximize the time. Usually face to face were looking for your body language, your tone, how you handle the questions we ask and general fit for the role. If I am hiring you as a BDR/SDR, and I'd like to promote you into carrying a quota, were looking for energy, interest, and passion.

How many cold calls did you make when you started ...

My first inside sales phone job was at PCConnection, a big national reseller of computer gear. I started before the .com bubble burst in 1999. You had a territory, and 3 KPI's (Key Performance Indicators): Sales Revenue per Month, Calls per Day and Talk time per day. With business being good they didn't care about the last two, but as soon as the economy crashed and the sales went down, it was ALL ABOUT the calls and talk time. They moved it to 65 calls a day and 3 hours of talk time.

What's craziest objection you've heard on the phone ?

I recently had a guy put our entire project on hold because of Trumps steel tariffs and a hurricane affecting his parents house in Florida, lmao. Dude just was like "There is too much shyt going on, I'm punting this until next year. Thanks for your time. CLICK!!" After working on it with his entire team for like 8 months.

What's your current method for client acquisition... Email/Coldcalls/Direct mail/"networking" ?

Separate from the corporate acquisition strategy (Data building, lead scoring, lead nurturing, content marketing, SEO/SEM, trade shows, panelist spots, business development pods and inside sales reps) it greatly depends on the company. In my current role, I head up channel and alliances, so rather than selling something directly to an end user, I am forging partnerships to help gain market position and new leads sourced further down the funnel. In this role, its strategic cold calling from time to time, but much more of a LinkedIn/email introduction to the contact with the same and/or similar title to mine. The response rate is sky high, since its basically both of our roles to have a chat and see if there is joint business opportunity for our companies.

Since you are in high tech ...what are your thoughts on Jelurida and Factom ?

Blockchain is the new buzzword for sure, just like 'IOT' was, and 'Cloud' before that. The last two companies I have been at haven't been leveraging either tool/platform too heavily into their product road map, so I don't run into either company/offering much yet..

 

[Cynic]

65 calls is nice but light compared to finance and wealth management ...300-400 calls a day

at dude in Florida ... 8 months is a long lead time to close a deal. Usually government contracts
take that long or even longer when you are dealing with a board of directors.


Just out of interest... in terms of self assessment what would you say are your strong points and what are your week points ?

 

[Listen]

65 calls is nice but light compared to finance and wealth management ...300-400 calls a day

at dude in Florida ... 8 months is a long lead time to close a deal. Usually government contracts
take that long or even longer when you are dealing with a board of directors.


Just out of interest... in terms of self assessment what would you say are your strong points and what are your week points ?

Yeah. I have several friends who went into capital finance sales. Those auto dialers have those 300 dials ready to go lmao. I have been selling mostly SaaS products in the marketing automation space, mainly into High Tech and Manufacturing, so the sales cycles are almost always 6 months unless your grabbing blue birds. On most days, its a VP - C level person at companies like Cisco, HP, VMWare that buys the stuff my company sell.

Self assessment is an interesting topic. I made a pact with myself when I turned 30 that I didn't want to be 'just a sales guy' when I was 40. Be careful what you wish for......

I spent the last 10 years moving up in responsibilities and titles until I got up to head of sales in a small 12 Million services company, reporting directly to the board of the PE Firm that owned us. I learned so much...one of those things I learned is that I may not really like being that responsible for the outcome of a company unless I was a real co owner and fully invested in the product and culture.

Making decisions on hiring people and then letting them go 2 weeks later because a deal didn't come in is not one of my strengths lmao.

I am really capable at the C suite which is why I have been able to move up so much without a large education. (I don't even have a bachelors degree. I took night classes and still don't even have enough credits for an Associates). AKA: I am a confident speaker with high emotional intelligence. I am awful with details and awful with repetitive tasks though......

 

[phcitywarrior]

@Listen do you have a particular style of selling? Challenger vs Spin selling?

What are your thoughts on Corporate Sales Strategy & Ops as a function that enables Corporate Sales?

 

[Listen]

@Listen do you have a particular style of selling? Challenger vs Spin selling?

What are your thoughts on Corporate Sales Strategy & Ops as a function that enables Corporate Sales?

I had Sandler training young and have had a few employers invest in Sandler and Spin since. This will sounds stupid probably, but I don’t believe in anything besides what is natural for you. Some tactics are just good ideas that anyone can implement, while others are mentally and physically taxing exercises unless your personality model fits the style.

Example: Up front contracts are just always a great thing to leverage, period. It requires no distinct personality trait, it’s just a simple process to create check in points for how you spend your time and move a prospect through the funnel with them having some buy in to not go dark on you.

When you don’t have an up front contract, you can finish a call or a demo and the prospect can basically go “ok well thanks this is super helpful. I’ll have some discussions internally and get back to you.” Then they go dark.

If you start your call with “So I’m going to ask you a few questions, and I know you’ll have some for me. If at the end of this call, we agree together that we can help you solve your problem, the next step would be to pull your larger team in for a deeper dive sometime in the next two weeks. How does that sound to you?” You have them agree before you give them anything of value...that way they know the ground rules.

On the whole, I fukkin hate Sales Ops lmao. The only thing a sales strategy needs is competent sales people with good tools and goals/comps that are achievable and aligned. In most companies I’ve seen, as soon as a team doesn’t hit their goals, ops comes in to try to tell them how to their jobs lol. Going through it as we speak, again, for the 3000th time.

 

[phcitywarrior]

On the whole, I fukkin hate Sales Ops lmao. The only thing a sales strategy needs is competent sales people with good tools and goals/comps that are achievable and aligned. In most companies I’ve seen, as soon as a team doesn’t hit their goals, ops comes in to try to tell them how to their jobs lol. Going through it as we speak, again, for the 3000th time.

I do think Sales Strategy and Ops can help with a lot of the account planning and analytics. The sellers then can focus on simply selling. I say this as I work in Sales Strategy and Ops and this is the partnership we form with our sellers.

 

[Cynic]

Yeah. I have several friends who went into capital finance sales. Those auto dialers have those 300 dials ready to go lmao.

That feeling when a prospect gives every objection in the book and you have 35 rebuttals ready to close that ass

I spent the last 10 years moving up in responsibilities and titles until I got up to head of sales in a small 12 Million services company, reporting directly to the board of the PE Firm that owned us. I learned so much...one of those things I learned is that I may not really like being that responsible for the outcome of a company unless I was a real co owner and fully invested in the product and culture.

Care to share what tips you learned on the way ? ... like in terms of managing teams, keeping to targets and the like.

It's always good to pick the brains of high performance individuals. I for one never want to be that "a$$hole"
who knows everything.

Have you ever thought of buying your own firm ? If not... why not ?

I am really capable at the C suite which is why I have been able to move up so much without a large education. (I don't even have a bachelors degree. I took night classes and still don't even have enough credits for an Associates). AKA: I am a confident speaker with high emotional intelligence. I am awful with details and awful with repetitive tasks though......

Hey it happens to the best of us. There usually two types of executives... one with brilliant ideas and poor execution
or those that execute well but lack creative problem solving. Very rare do you find the thinker with military follow through

 

[Listen]

I do think Sales Strategy and Ops can help with a lot of the account planning and analytics. The sellers then can focus on simply selling. I say this as I work in Sales Strategy and Ops and this is the partnership we form with our sellers.

It clearly has an important role, but also greatly depends on the sales structure within the company.

If you have a multi tiered structure with BDR’s, AE’s, SE’s, Sales Management layers and also sell through channel partners, sales ops is incredibly important in streamlining the way the team moves prospects to revenue recognition.

The issues I’ve run into is that Sales Ops can easily start telling sales what to sell, and driving the company to become too operationally driven. It can become a gateway to “Our customers are bad and sales people sell the wrong things the wrong way”.

Granted, I’ve worked with some fairly weak sales leaders in the past that have allowed that to happen, and many companies have an had Sales Ops roll up through Client delivery, so I am jaded lol.