Deals die in the details...so pay attention
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- 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.
- 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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