#204 Support The Customer by Holding Something in Reserve

Notes:

How can sales engineers improve their role to further help guide customers to buy and how can they collaborate better with their salespeople so they are aligned? In this episode, Brent Keltner of Winalytics shares his brilliant insights on how our approach to sales can be improved, what we can do as sales engineers to improve, and how we can help our customers come up with a buyer success statement that will be beneficial for everyone involved in the company.

Brent Keltner is the President of Winalytics, a go-to-market and revenue acceleration consultancy, and author of The Revenue Acceleration Playbook, which is all about how to shift from product-driven selling to an authentic buyer journey.

Brent has 10 years of experience as a revenue leader in enterprise to early-stage companies and 10 years as a Ph.D. social scientist at Stanford and the RAND Corporation. His clients have included among others AdmitHub, Ascend Learning, Credo Reference, DealerRater, Lexmark, Mursion and True Fit.

Key Takeaways:

Brent introduces himself as the president of Winalytics
The difference between old school selling and how selling is like today and what it might be in the future
Three things that may have been attributed to this shift in selling
How can a salesperson talk about technology while they’re not experts in it?
A shift in sales engineering where the salesperson is doing the introduction and in managing the sales cycle in general, but the sales engineer is coming in and talking about what are the problems customers are facing during the discovery
A good way for a salesperson to guide the buyers is through gap questioning
Why sometimes the sales engineer should come in after the salesperson has already talked with the customer
What techniques can salespeople use to not give everything away to the customer right off the bat and hold valuable resources such as the SE in reserve?
How can sales engineers further improve in terms of doing demos, discovery, and asking questions?
Why sales engineers should focus on getting the buyer success statement and how do we get that from our customers if there are many other roles involved in the buying process
Salespeople should be a collaborator on the path to partnership
Always make sure that you educate your buyers on how to buy
How SEs can help in formulating a sales to success plan
Capturing current and potential goal areas in a sales and success notes document that could be shared within a CRM with the salesperson

Quotes:

“In the old world, the buyer needed you to find out about your product. In the new world, the buyers are overwhelmed with information about you and your product.”

“You always got to go back to what your buyers are trying to solve. Without going back to what your buyers are trying to solve, you’re totally lost”.

“People need to think about the buyer success statement. The buyer success statement, is the buyer saying in their own words, what would make them successful?”

“Until you have a buyer success statement, you do not have a sales opportunity!”

“Building value plays, right things like does your product help with increased revenue, or increase operational efficiency or change your user experience or like agility change the time to business insights. The reason to start with that is you can get buyer personas lined up on a value play.”

“Verbally recap the buyer statement in your first call, you put it in an email before your second call with a group, you put it in a slide. And honestly, it’s what your proposal should lead with”

“In the end, when we’re working with organizations, we’re working with people.”

Links from the show:

The Revenue Acceleration Playbook by Brent Keltner or Visit the book website authenticitywins.com and you can download the foreword written by David Meerman Scott, and the first chapter of the book.

Winalytics

Connect with Brent on Linkedin

Spin Selling by Neil Rackham

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