Delve Into The Details To Make Every Sale With Josh McKenty

Wes Schaeffer | June 2, 2023

Deals die in the details...so pay attention

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Professional Sales Tips you'll learn today on The Sales Podcast...

Why Josh?
- Led the first Cloud migration project of the US government as Cloud Architect;
- Founder/CTO of Piston (acquired)
- Early Team Lead at Netscape;
- Team Lead at NASA;
- Founder of Delving.

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Dual citizen: USA and Canada.
2007 at NASA, helping with cloud computing.
Started writing software at age six and selling at age seven.
He always enjoyed getting in front of customers.
Was a sickly child, so he couldn't do a lot of sports around 1983, and his mom had a computer, so he was able to learn early on.
Learned to type and learned to spell at the same time.
Sales and Sales Ops see each other as a necessary evil.
But Sales Ops needs to know what the play is.
"CTC Selling" Change the Conversation.
Become a trusted advisor from a product salesperson.
Subscription models make you earn your sale every month.
Help your customer prove they got value.
CTC Selling becomes personal.
All business is personal.
Help your champion.
Application Owner, Business Owner, CIO—ABC.
His parents sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door.
He did training quarterly when he had a global role.
The fundamentals don't change.

Be honest.
Drive the details.
BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs, Timing), MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion).

Deals die in the details."

Delivery, when, and where?
Do you get over-commitment of resources?
CRMs end up being dumped into spreadsheets.
All of this ERP data goes into spreadsheets.
Delving into the data.
Data science was big in the work he was doing.
None of this was working.

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They were tracking every touch and using BI tools, but it was hectic and inefficient.
The data is always changing.
Then COVID and the Suez Canal and the supply chain issue hit.

None of this was working."

The auto industry was hit really hard.
Vendors were logging into Ford's portal.
The downside was the cost of stopping the entire production line.

We have a pile of spreadsheets, and we're trying to make sense of it."

Dates, dollars, details...most sales reps don't want to talk about.
800 million people use Excel monthly.
He's just pragmatic about it.
The spreadsheet is what is passed back and forth.
You need a sense of traceability.
The board uses it for presentations.
It's not just embarrassing if you get it wrong, but it hurts relationships.
He had a great team at Pivotal that wanted to continue working with him.
The reason people never dealt with this problem is that it is stupidly hard in a boring way.
Comparing two spreadsheets is hard.
It's not like tracking changes in Word.
He spent a full year working this out.
He did a lot of hard math work to know they had a viable solution.
Then they got feedback from customers.
He raised money from VCs with whom he had relationships.
Don't leave the boring details to be your customer's problem.
He loves Challenge Selling, but you have to be right and have a track record and be humble about it.
He was covering Gap at one point, and they were suffering, and he showed up to a conference sponsored by the CIO. Here's the QRM (quantitative risk management). You're losing, and here's why.
Let's turn your challenge into the plan.
There are no magic bullets, but there are bullets.
Bill Cook and James Watters at Pivotal.
You can't wait until the of the quarter.
Pace of change is key.
Paul Maritz was their CEO, and he had a vision.
He knew the value the first three customers were receiving.
Just rinse and repeat.
JP Morgan Chase knew what they wanted to do with Pivotal.
His learning loop got faster.
Learn from patterns.
(Batch your sales calls.)
If you have a Monday meeting, check out Delving.

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