#604 - Upsell & Expansion Masterclass: 7 Lever to Grow Any Account

0:00Armand Farrokh: Most people think account management and account executives have the exact same jobs. One is working customers, the other is working prospects. Well, you are completely wrong if you think that is the case, because account executives' jobs are to hunt or find opportunities. Account managers' jobs is to create opportunities. In other words, instead of finding a problem that exists in the ether, you are oftentimes starting with proof that you have already delivered value to a customer, and that is what gives you the right to start another sales cycle. And if you don't have that, you do not have an expansion opportunity.

0:32Armand Farrokh: So today we are going to teach you everything you could possibly need to expand accounts, whether you're an account manager or an AE selling into an install base. And I have the one and only Mark Costaglo, who is the legendary CRO who led outreach from zero to 250 million in ARR. But what you might not know is from 100 million in ARR to 250 million, almost all of the growth came from the existing customer base. most of the growth was less about new business and more about expanding existing accounts. So we're going to go through three things in Mark's account management sales cycle today. Number one, what is the fundamental job difference between a hunter, an AE, versus a farmer, an account manager?

1:13Armand Farrokh: Number two, how do you run an expansion sales cycle in Mark's four-step account management cycle? And then lastly, number three, how do you map white space in your territory and find expansion opportunities, aka the seven levers to expand accounts. Let's do it. Mark, what is the difference between an account executive's job and an account manager's job?

1:34Mark Kosoglow: All right. The major difference, Armand, is very simple. It's when you're an AE, you're selling promise. You're selling the promise of value. You get to go through one sales cycle, five stages. You don't have to prove anything really other than like get them over some mental hurdles, but the promise is what the person buys. The AM has to deliver the proof. They have to run another cycle. That's the cycle where they create value. The stages that they move a customer through to make sure that they're solving the problem that they already bought. If they do that, if they show the proof of the promise kept, then they get to make another promise and they get to run another sales cycle to make another promise.

2:11Mark Kosoglow: You make that good, you get to do it over again. And that's the loop. The more you run those cycles, the faster you run them, the more you collide with the ability to sell more stuff.

2:20Armand Farrokh: So the key shift in what creates pipeline for an account executive versus an account manager is prospecting creates pipeline for an account executive. Value delivery creates pipeline for an account manager. If you have not delivered value on an account through your CSM, through your existing relationship with your customer, then there is no pipeline and you need to focus on helping your team deliver more value. Versus as an AE, you can just drop the account and go cold call another one. So Mark, you talked about the three jobs of an account manager. What are the three core jobs on that basis of an AM?

2:51Mark Kosoglow: Job one, you own the executive relationship. It's your job to create it, to maintain it, and to deepen it. Everything happens from the executive relationship. The second thing that you need to do is you need to leverage those relationships to understand what the outcomes they need are. That's the target. So you have the right person. Now you have the right target. And the last thing you're supposed to do is you need to ensure that the CSM is driving the success plan to hit that target on target and on time. And so if you do those sort of things, if you create, strengthen, and deepen, and maintain those executive relationships, if you use that to get the outcomes that they need, and then your CSM delivers on target, on time, the plan to get those outcomes, that's when you've proven that you can do stuff.

3:34Mark Kosoglow: That's when you have now done your prospecting. The next conversation that you get to have is about how you can do that again and it might involve a sales opportunity.

3:42Armand Farrokh: A lot of people will get frustrated when a CSM gets caught in the weeds of the technicalities and they're handling support tickets and they're in the weeds with their admin frontline solving technical problems. That is actually the CSM's job. You want your CSM in the weeds because they're the ones who are making the customers happy, but it's the AM's job to be the constant multi-threader on the account to make sure that everything a CSM is doing is actually proving value and being delivered back to an

4:08Mark Kosoglow: executive you need that person in the weeds and the person that needs to be in the weeds is that csn that understands the product best that understands how to create value inside the product best the am's job is to stay above that and make sure that that's staying on track and that they're communicating it up to the executives but if you don't have anybody in the weeds then nobody's in the weeds and that's when trouble starts all right so let's talk about what it

4:28Armand Farrokh: actually looks like to run expansion on an account so you have a four-step account management loop But before then, I want to talk about how you even decide to engage with an account as an account manager. Most people engage with an account because they have a QBR on our calendar. Your suggestion instead is to engage on their timeline, which requires you to understand their executive initiatives and their projects. Could you explain that a little bit more?

4:56Mark Kosoglow: Yeah. So we get a project that we're running. And along that project, there's going to be updates when we've made progress. There's going to be at the end of the project where we talk about what we've done and how it's mattered. And what ends up happening is AMs try to piggyback on already scheduled calendar-based meetings, like a QBR or a monthly progress update. There's no real reason for them to be in that meeting, and it gets awkward, and you're trying to steal time from the CSM who might have stuff to do. What we need to do instead is we need to get everybody, CSM included, aligned on a project-based meeting rhythm.

5:29Mark Kosoglow: And what I mean by that is there's a kickoff. Then after that, we need to make sure that the kickoff happened well and that we're progressing in the right stage. And then there's like a mid-project meeting where we talk about like this is what's going on and all that kind of stuff or make a major milestone and we need to update them about that. And like what we want to do is we want the AM to align to those meetings of the project, the rhythm of the project, not the rhythm of the calendar. The calendar doesn't matter. What matters is are you driving the project forward and do you actually have something useful and beneficial to talk about so you drive the forward to get to that meeting?

6:01Mark Kosoglow: And then that's when you schedule a meeting. And that's when it's appropriate to talk about other things. But when you just have these random things on the calendar that happen every 30 or 90 days, maybe you have too much to share that. Maybe you don't have enough. Maybe you just shared something organically. Like what we want to do is we want to have that progress that is done on the project rhythm, not on the calendar.

6:20Armand Farrokh: So for example, we have a customer who has a massive product launch in October, and then they have their sales kickoff or their revenue kickoff in February. If our QBR rhythm was on, call it December and March, I would be two months late to their product launch. And then I would be one month late to their RKO, both of which would be upsell opportunities. And so instead of me saying, I just randomly have to throw a recurring every three months invite on your calendar. I want to make sure I understand what are your business initiatives. And whenever those things are going on, I want to plant the perfect touchpoint right as you are about to complete those things, right as you're preparing for those things, right as we're about to report results on those things, instead of just randomly hoping that in the next QBR, I happen to catch you in a buying window.

7:09Armand Farrokh: So Mark, let's talk about what it actually looks like to run the full account management loop with a customer. So what are the four steps in the account management loop?

7:16Mark Kosoglow: The first thing you have to do is understand the executive outcome. What is the target that they need to hit? The second thing we need to do is we need to deliver that value proof by running the project with the CSM so that the product can actually do what it's supposed to do and get that outcome. Once we've done that, we need to go to step three of the loop, which is we have to communicate that back to the customer. Always say, you know, like a tree that falls in the floor doesn't make a sound if no one's around. In the same way in account management, if you provide value for a customer, but they don't actually acknowledge it, then you didn't really create the value.

7:50Mark Kosoglow: You've got to communicate it back to them and get them to acknowledge, yes, you created that value for me. And that leads to step four of the loop, which is now we get the next outcome and we go back to step one. We got that outcome figured out. We deliver the proof. We communicate it back. And we just run that as many times and as fast as we can.

8:06Armand Farrokh: So an example for this using our current B2B enablement program would be step one is we might identify the executive outcome, which might be boosting pipeline coverage by 25%. And we might decide that the way that we want to do that is by getting the SDRs better at cold calling and cold emailing. So step two is we might come up with a plan to get the SDRs onboarded onto the cold calling and cold email program. And for three to six months, we might run a trial period where we're like, okay, let's make sure the SDRs get the results. Step three is we're then going to communicate it back and be like, look, your SDRs are like delivering results.

8:35Armand Farrokh: They're booking more meetings, which is great. And then step four might be let's go identify the next outcome, which might be going and helping your account management team or your AEs increase their win rates or stuff like that. But what allows us to even have that conversation is us having delivered the results in the first place to the SDR function. So let's talk about what it even looks like to identify that first meaty executive outcome, which is kind of what we call discovery on the AE side. This would be like almost account management or expansion discovery. So you talk about five places you can commonly engage with a customer to identify an executive outcome.

9:11Armand Farrokh: Let's start with number one.

9:12Mark Kosoglow: The first one is the handoff after the closed one opportunity happens. When the AE gives the AM. A lot of companies, the AM isn't even involved in implementation. What a mistake. The minute that that account is yours, you need to engage in it right away to make sure that the value loop is starting to turn. So what you want to do with that AE is you want to verify the executive outcomes that they use to win the deal. And that's the first set of value that you drive. Figure out what they are, grab them from the AE, make sure your CSM stays on target to them, and then deliver those, and then that lets your next one happen.

9:47Armand Farrokh: Today's show is brought to you by Proposify, the proposal management software designed to make every deal a closed deal. When you send a proposal to a prospect, include a video of yourself walking through the proposal because it's going to be shared with stakeholders beyond just your champion. You want to make it easy for those other people to digest, and you want to be able to control the narrative with your presentation. And bonus, Proposify data shows that when buyers watch the video, It increases your chances of winning by over 3x. So do not let your proposals become a disappointing plot twist.

10:13Armand Farrokh: Get our proposal success guide free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Ambition, the coaching and performance platform helping sales leaders turn metrics into action. Did you know that sales orgs where the majority of reps are coached weekly are twice as likely to see high quota attainment than those who don't? And that is from Ambition's new state of sales coaching report that also found teams using a system like Ambition coach almost 60 % more frequently than those who don't have one. Now, we built a toolkit with our friends in Ambition on how to actually use data to coach your team.

10:40Armand Farrokh: Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple-choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C. Which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes.

11:08Armand Farrokh: And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes. The reality, folks, is when people buy your software or your infrastructure or whatever it is, they're usually buying it because of an executive outcome. And so the natural first executive outcome you can find is the one that made them buy the thing in the first place. And if you know they're probably going to achieve that result in three to four months, then go schedule the next touch point for somewhere around that time frame instead of some random QBR time frame. So that's number one.

11:41Armand Farrokh: Number two is during implementation. Explain that.

11:43Mark Kosoglow: Yeah. During implementation, things change. Sometimes the business need changes. And it's always great to have a touch point in implementation where you're doubling down. Like there's nothing I don't think that an AM can do that's more important than making sure that the target that you're pushing towards is still accurate. So let's say during implementation, you're starting to give an update based on the rhythm of the project of what's going on. And in that, you want to just always anchor on. Now, you said you wanted to increase your pipeline coverage by 25%. Is that still right? Are we still aiming at the right target?

12:16Mark Kosoglow: And if not, you need to change and say, listen, I think we need to change what we're implementing to because we were implementing to this other thing about having better connect rates. And now you're saying you want better coverage. So we need to change what we're doing. Is that what you want to do? And that gives you a chance to do the discovery and reassess what's most important to make sure that you're driving the right value.

12:37Armand Farrokh: So in the handoff, naturally, there's a conversation because they signed. During implementation, they're probably having ongoing meetings with their implementation manager, their CSM. mid-engagement, how do I get that introduction to even have that meeting with a prospect or an executive?

12:52Mark Kosoglow: Yeah. So a lot of times what you'll want to do to get a meeting with an executive is we have to think about ATL, BTO. Who are we currently engaged with inside the account? If the CSM is engaged with somebody lower level, then we're going to have to use that person to get us up so that we can get out and create our multi-channeled approach. Now, as an AM, job number one is to create, maintain, and deepen executive relationships. This is the first thing that you have to do. It's the only thing that matters. Without this, nothing else matters. And so what we're always going to do is we're going to go to the person that the CSM is working with in the rhythm of the project for a progress update or something like that.

13:26Mark Kosoglow: And we're going to go into that meeting. We're going to say, listen, I want to make sure that what we're delivering is on target to the value that matters to your executive. Would you mind if we set up an executive conversation for that person just so I can take a second to make sure I understand the executive outcomes that they need to make sure that we continue to have the right plan in place to hit those. Most admins, if you do that correctly, are willing to do that. The only reason they're not is when you start to come in and you start to have commission breath and they feel like you're going to make a pitch out of it.

13:55Mark Kosoglow: But when you make it about reaffirming your ability to create the value that that customer needs, they're always happy to help you do that.

14:04Armand Farrokh: So that is mid-engagement. Now let's talk about the end of the engagement. Oftentimes you can re-engage for an upsell or an expansion right around renewal.

14:13Mark Kosoglow: Yeah, renewal is the best time for expansion. Renewal is a commercial milestone where it's your job to talk about everything that's happened. And if you've run this cycle multiple times, if you run this loop multiple times, you should have multiple evidences of your ability to create value that earns you the right to ask for more, to ask for more years, to ask for new business units, to ask for different products. And so that's what we want to do at the renewals. The renewal rhythm is a commercial transaction moment in the relationship. We want to make it about the commercial motion and that commercial motion should include an expansion of some kind if you've delivered the value to so far.

14:51Mark Kosoglow: Now, if you just show up cold and you've had this account for eight months and your second meeting with them is the renewal meeting, you better not come and ask them for more money because that's like a stranger knocking on the door trying to sell you some old brooms.

15:02Armand Farrokh: So the fifth one is your favorite. which is your CS rhythms, the QBR.

15:06Mark Kosoglow: Sometimes as an AM, you don't have the ability to affect exactly how an account is approached. And there's other processes and other departments that have their requirements. And maybe one of them is a calendar-based rhythm of a QBR. You can still go to that QBR meeting and use it for what you need to, but you can't just show up hoping to run sidecar and getting 15 minutes to talk about sales stuff. You need to come in and ask your CSM, where are we at in the project? What is the last value thing that we created? And you can create that boring, normal calendar-based meeting that you need to get out of the rhythm of into something that you can actually use to create opportunity and to make sure that you're on track.

15:45Mark Kosoglow: Again, this is the difference between an AE and AM. An AE's job is just to close the deal. As an AM, if you're only worried about closing deals, you will not be nearly half as successful as you will be if you help a customer get value. because value is what gets the customer to ask you for more projects. They ask you to help them out for more. They ask for more value, and more value is how you create more commercial gain inside the account.

16:13Armand Farrokh: So, Mark, now we know where you can initiate an executive conversation as an account manager. Let's talk about how you actually run one of those calls. There are three steps that you have when you run an account management-style discovery call versus an AE-style one. Step number one is you recap the results that you've already achieved from the last project that you set out to achieve. Number two is you then run discovery to potentially identify what next outcome you could help them achieve. And then lastly, number three, you come back with a next step to go and initiate or potentially go and try to solve for that outcome.

16:48Mark Kosoglow: This is where the roles overlap a little bit. There's not that much difference between an AM and an AE discovery call. The biggest difference is how you frame it. As an AE, you're going to come in and you're going to just start with a hypothesis or some kind of researched example to begin your discovery. You can't do that as an AM. The first thing you have to start out with is the trust factor. It is, this is what you asked us to do, and this is the result that we got. When you start with that, you frame in your ability to keep promises, which gives you the right to ask and make another promise.

17:22Mark Kosoglow: And then that's when you go into your discovery. Now, where the difference is as a discovery here is that you should have a much more informed view based on what your CSM has been doing in the weeds to figure out what is the next thing that they need to do. Now, if the process has been going really well and smooth, this is where your hypothesis should include something that includes another product or a new business unit or something that allows you to open up the expansion conversation. For example, Armand, we were able to deliver that 25 % increase in pipeline coverage by talking to your BDRs.

17:55Mark Kosoglow: Did you know that we can lower your pipeline coverage needs if we increase your win rates as an AE? That sounds like something that I've heard in our conversations that you've been interested in is win rates. Is that true? See, now we've created an informed or research-based discovery that allows us to add in more users and an expansion. Not if it's not going good, if it's been rocky, if they have support tickets that haven't been taken care of, if the CSM has been disengaged. If you don't understand what's going on, don't start with a hypothesis that includes a new product. Start with a hypothesis that includes stuff they've already paid for to start begin building that trust.

18:31Mark Kosoglow: And then the last thing we do is at the end of the discovery, we have all the ingredients, again, that that CSM needs to cook. We're going to say, listen, let me go back with my product expert, your CSM. We've delivered this value before. Let us come back in a week with a plan that we can show you how you can get to this outcome using the product. You create that plan with the CSM. It includes the new product if that's applicable. And then you come back in and you pitch that as part of your demo as an AM. Your demo is now showing them in the platform the new stuff that they can do versus showing them a brand new platform and what it can do.

19:02Mark Kosoglow: Again, it's that promise versus proof thing.

19:04Armand Farrokh: So step two is you now need to deliver the value proof. And so, Mark, this is where you talk about the relationship between the AM and the CSM. What should I be doing as an AM in this step?

19:16Mark Kosoglow: This is the critical part of being an AM. It is assembling all the ingredients. You're the grocery shopper for the best restaurant in town. Your job is to figure out what is the executive that matters. What is the outcome that matters to them? What is the metric that says that that outcome has been achieved? What is the timeline they need to do? Those are all those special ingredients. Your job is now to give that to the CSM. The CSM chef's job is to chop them up and create this beautiful dish with it, right? But you need to make sure, like, they didn't want a soup. Why are you making a soup? They wanted a salad, all right, but they don't like olives.

19:48Mark Kosoglow: Get those salads out of there, right? Your job is to make sure that the meal that they're creating with the ingredients that you give them is exactly what that diner in the restaurant wants, exactly what that executive buyer wants. You're also now the waiter. Your job is to come back and take that dish, to take that thing that the CSM built inside your product and to sell the buyer on why it was awesome. And that's where AMs forget. They just kind of go in and they're like, yeah, our product does what it does. What do you need to sell next? Versus instead, get those ingredients to that CSM chef.

20:16Mark Kosoglow: Let them cook it up. Make sure they're cooking the right dish and then bring out and sell that dish back. Deliver that proof of how awesome your product is. And then guess what? They're going to order dessert.

20:26Armand Farrokh: So those are Chef Mark's steps two and three, which is delivering the value proof and then communicating it back, which is the difference between a CSM's job, who is the chef, and the sommelier's job or the waiter's job to present the dish. And that is the AM's job. Mark, let's actually go back to step two in delivering value proof here. You talked about a big shift in the responsibility of who owns the account. If something is going wrong in an account, who do you as the CRO reach out to?

20:57Mark Kosoglow: There is one DRI, directly responsible individual in account, one owner, and it's the account manager. It is the AM. They are the single throat to choke, as it were. Their job is to make sure that the account stays with us and that we increase the value of that account. If the account doesn't stay with us, they never get to increase the value. So if you think as an AM, your job is to just sell expansion, you're missing the point. That's like saying an AM's job is just to close deals. An AE's job is to source pipeline so that they have deals to close. An AM's job is to make sure that they deliver the value that is needed so that they can get opportunities to sell just like an AE does.

21:41Mark Kosoglow: Your book is modeled on every account expanding. It's not modeled on only the healthy, fat, happy accounts expanding. It's modeled on all of them expanding. If you want to have your whole book to expand to, you need to make sure all your customers are happy.

21:54Armand Farrokh: Today's show is brought to you by Proposify, the proposal management software designed to make every deal a closed deal. When you send a proposal to a prospect, include a video of yourself walking through the proposal because it's going to be shared with stakeholders beyond just your champion. You want to make it easy for those other people to digest, and you want to be able to control the narrative with your presentation. And bonus, Proposify data shows that when buyers watch the video, it increases your chances of winning by over 3x. So do not let your proposals become a disappointing plot twist.

22:21Armand Farrokh: Get our proposal success guide free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Ambition, the coaching and performance platform helping sales leaders turn metrics into action. Did you know that sales orgs where the majority of reps are coached weekly are twice as likely to see high quota attainment than those who don't? And that is from Ambition's new state of sales coaching report that also found teams using a system like Ambition coach almost 60 % more frequently than those who don't have one. Now we built a toolkit with our friends in Ambition on how to actually use data to coach your team.

22:47Armand Farrokh: Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple-choice question, which sounds like, typically, when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C. Which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve, because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes.

23:15Armand Farrokh: and we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes. We're not going to do a full session on business cases and all of that stuff, but can you give me like an example or two of like what it would look like to communicate back the previous outcome you achieved and then go find the next outcome?

23:33Mark Kosoglow: To communicate it back, Armand, and to get the next outcome, what you want to do is you want to keep it simple. You know the person that matters, you know what they care about, you know the metric that they need to move and how much and when they need to move it by. So what we want to do is we want to come back with just reporting what we did. We want to serve it up and spiffy it up and make sure that it looks good and everything. But then we'll use that to piggyback off onto the next thing that we want to do. All right, now that I've given you this great thing in the time that you wanted it, what we now want to do is we need to move into what is the next thing that you want.

24:00Mark Kosoglow: Again, if it went really well, we're going to do something that has expansion potential involved in that hypothesis. If it's not going well, then we want to come back to a hypothesis that involves stuff that they're already paying for so we can begin to build that trust. I was recently at an on-site with Docebo where this exact thing happened. We came in. We were there for three days at one of the biggest companies in the world. We're talking to them about how they do a specific learning function inside their organization and how they're trying to improve ramp time of that function. We go in there.

24:28Mark Kosoglow: They told us we need to do this kickoff thing by this date. It needs to be this level of effective. We need to have this many people online. We hit all that stuff in. The first 20 minutes of the meeting on the on-site was just us saying, let's celebrate this awesome thing that we did look how many people we impacted look how much learning we created and the next thing you know what we did is we're like hey we heard during that process that you're having trouble with this other area of like creating content and wanting to use ai more so that you can get content out faster and higher quality well we have a product that helps you do that like let us show you how that workflow would work to see if it's going to help you meet some other outcomes that you need that we think are this this and this and these other projects that you've told us about.

25:07Mark Kosoglow: That's how you have a great conversation to open up the next phase, the next loop of value that you create, but one that creates an opportunity to sell something versus one that's just trying to get them to get more value out of the product they already have.

25:20Armand Farrokh: The final step of this process is you now know how to run the entire account management loop. And so how do I even find white space in my territory and identify account expansion opportunities in the first place? You have seven levers that you use to expand accounts. The first three are just, what are the things that literally increase the value of the contract?

25:43Mark Kosoglow: What are the three things? A new product. We're going to attach this new voice component of our product. We're going to attach this new AI module. It's a brand new product inside your suite or your platform. The second one is we're going to expand the scope. Meaning like, hey, right now we only work with AMs. We want to work with AEs too. Or we want to work with CSMs. or we want to take it from your engineering department over to your HR department. And the last thing is the commercial mechanics. That would be like, hey, we have a new type of package and we need to renew you early or you can prepay or you can restructure based on some consolidation you're doing or you want to extend a different way.

26:22Mark Kosoglow: These are the three ways that you can create additional revenue and there's four triggers that you look for to get those.

26:28Armand Farrokh: What are the four things that would lead me to even look for those things? Yeah.

26:33Mark Kosoglow: So again, we're going to craft that hypothesis that we're going to talk about after we've shown that we've created value and a trigger that you might want to create is like a new use case. Like, hey, right now we help you with your prospecting. We want to help you improve your win rates. That requires this new product. So see, we've used the new use case in order to get the actual thing that can increase the contract value of the new product. The second one is this happens from time to time where you've modernized something. You create a new pricing and packaging. You're releasing new AI pricing like everybody's doing new AI pricing all the time.

27:06Mark Kosoglow: That's a great trigger to then figure out when can I create a new product or create a new scope or create new commercial mechanics is when you have that like that commercial change that happens in how you can pitch a package, that pricing and packaging change. That's what another trigger is. The third one is consolidation. It's where you have competing products in other places or you have tangential products in other places that you can pull into your product. If we have a place like, for example, where I'm DocuSign and I want to figure out how to go beyond just getting the signature, I want to figure out how to do the contract management.

27:40Mark Kosoglow: now I can consolidate their current contract management provider into the e-signer and I can use that to create a new product so again when they're looking to consolidate and to save that's a chance for you to get one of those three areas of contract value increase and the last thing is M &A or org change when somebody's like about to buy somebody or get acquired or something like that that's a chance for you to take two different accounts that might have two different solutions and then what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that we capture that new entity solution and bring it over to ours versus just waiting around for the executives to figure out what they want to do.

28:18Mark Kosoglow: We're going to go grab that expansion and we're going to take that new account and we're going to put it into our fold versus us being churned so they can take it into theirs.

28:27Armand Farrokh: So a very simple action step you can take here is if you take your book of accounts, you can say, which of my accounts have these three things? Have room for new products, room for new seats, or room for possibly like upping price based on a new structure. That's the first thing you can do. And then based on where that white space exists, you can then ask what four of those triggers exist. For example, is there a new use case that I can use to either get more seats in the SDR organization or get new products into the AE organization, for example. So you use the four triggers to activate the white space in the three things that increase contract value.

29:05Armand Farrokh: So folks, now you know, one, what's the job difference between an AE and an AM? Two, you know how to run the four-step account management loop. And then three, you know the seven levers that you can use to expand accounts. So folks, that's wrapped. If you like this, you may not know that Mark Kosaglo is actually one of our most renowned course instructors because he teaches a sales leadership course and he's going to be teaching our account management curriculum as well as part of our b2b enablement program so you as a sales leader can buy his leadership course down below or if you want to train your entire sales team to president's club we have a program that literally teaches your reps anything from cold calling to discovery to negotiation even through account management and then we help you build out all of these playbooks so that you don't have to do this stuff on your own and try to interpret what to do and make sure you're doing it right after watching this video so if you want to learn more about that, go to 30mpc.com backslash training and go train your team to President's Club if you want them to learn from people like Mark and many of the great sales minds out there.

30:03Armand Farrokh: We'll see you on the next one. Today's show is brought to you by Proposify, the proposal management software designed to make every deal a closed deal. When you send a proposal to a prospect, include a video of yourself walking through the proposal because it's going to be shared with stakeholders beyond just your champion. You want to make it easy for those other people to digest and you want to be able to control the narrative with your presentation. And bonus, This Proposify data shows that when buyers watch the video, it increases your chances of winning by over 3x. So do not let your proposals become a disappointing plot twist.

30:30Armand Farrokh: Get our proposal success guide free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Ambition, the coaching and performance platform helping sales leaders turn metrics into action. Did you know that sales orgs where the majority of reps are coached weekly are twice as likely to see high quota attainment than those who don't? And that is from Ambition's new state of sales coaching report that also found teams using a system like Ambition coach almost 60 % more frequently than those who don't have one. Now we built a toolkit with our friends in Ambition on how to actually use data to coach your team.

30:56Armand Farrokh: Get it for free in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple-choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C. Which is it for you? Now A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve, because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes.

31:25Armand Farrokh: And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes.