Why Great Sellers Hold the Line in Discovery with Stuart Gwynn

0:10Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast, hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. Today we're joined by Stuart Gwynn, an enterprise seller at MongoDB, who has been over goal every year since joining the company and closed the largest deal in MongoDB history. In this clip, Stuart breaks down one of the hardest disciplines in enterprise selling, staying in the customer's pain long enough to understand whether the problem is real, urgent, and worth solving. He explains why pipeline creates the courage to slow down, why teams need to prepare before customer conversations, and why the best sellers qualify out just as intentionally as they qualify in.

0:44For revenue leaders, this is a useful reminder that discovery is not just about gathering information. It is where trust is built, weak opportunities are exposed, and the team earns the right to attach to bigger business problems. Let's dive in.

1:00you talk about Stuart sitting in the moment. It's so hard for sellers to do. It's great advice. Probably one of the best advice I've ever heard is, you know, teach yourself to be patient thinking about the, you know, that, that famous scene in, in the movies where the, you know, where the person saying, hold, hold. And you just, you know, You want to jump in and say how MongoDB can solve something. What are some of the ways, and you talked about your personality being, you know, you're personable, probably empathetic. How do you get somebody to sit in their own moment of pain without it feeling like you're badgering them?

1:50How do you do that? Like, first of all, do you agree with that? Is it hard to hold and stay in a point and just go, customer says, yeah, we got a problem with that. Okay, I've got a problem. Got a check in the box. We'll move on to the next problem. How do you go deep with a customer and earn the right to do that? To answer your question, it's definitely hard. And it's also hard to make sure the team does it. Sometimes there's scenarios where you have your SA or your CSM or your inside rep with you and someone wants to jump in or even product person. right? We may go in with our product team. We're disguising this as a Trojan horse.

2:26Here's the product person. We got to do some discovery up front. And we hear something, the product person goes, our product can do that. Here's how we do it. It's on the roadmap. So holding the line is definitely challenging, especially for sales reps too, because we're supposed to be the face of the relationship. We are. And I think there's a few ways that you can do it. I mean, one, the most important thing, and it's almost obviously cliche, but pipeline builds courage, Right. And so when you when you're desperate for a deal, you're going to attach to everything you're going to move to quickly.

2:55If you have enough pipeline, you have the experience, but you have the courage behind, OK, I don't need every deal, but let's really make sure this is the right fit. And we're qualifying out almost as much as we're qualifying in. That's really like our time is the most valuable asset. So if you can sit in that moment with the client and make sure you're slowing down, you're holding the line, and you're asking them the series of questions in a way that doesn't feel like the inquisition. It's like marrying the science of the framework with the art of being personal and intentional and curious. You can get to a point where we say drag them through the glass, right?

3:33They have to participate in their own rescue to some degree. And to do that, they have to understand exactly the current state that they're in and maybe perhaps more pain than they think they are. Don't you have to be prepared with a potential, like when you're sitting there, you have to have a high confidence that this problem probably exists with or without you sitting here having this conversation. That gives you confidence. And then you also have to prepare. it's especially important, I think, in the implication of the problem, where we know and we understand the implications because we see the problem every day.

4:14But getting a person to stand in that moment of the implication is, oh, and by the way, I don't think that's ever going to be replaced by AI, is that moment where somebody gives me an answer, but I need to go deeper and understand the implication of that problem financially, emotionally, all the different implications of it outside of my department, attached to a bigger business issue. And then what you just brought up, that's just for yourself. How do you prepare the team? Hey, man, we want to go deep here. So let the customer talk. How do you do that? so to answer your question reverse you know a prep call is is i think probably industry standard but making sure that there's a document right usually have a readout and i'll send it to the team that's going to be in the meeting with me and say look here's the one or two goals of what we're trying to accomplish here's the line of questioning that we may want to go down depending on you know be audible ready but here's specific people that i think in this situation will be relevant and then we get on a call we talk it through hey if it goes this direction here's where i think you know you can take this cap versus if it goes wide direction, then I think it would be better if, you know, Johnny over here takes the question or prompts this note.

5:34When you prep in that way and you also bring it through the lens of we're curious, we care, but also we've seen it before. So a lot of times the internal proof points is powerful as the external proof point. And it's, we've worked with your org. We've seen this more than you. We work with your org who solve modernization issues day in and day out, and they've run into these challenges just over there in the other line of business, neighbors of yours. And here's what they found. Does that sound relevant? And so when you ask questions like that, and it's almost like the herd theory, you're leading them to, oh, if all my peers are doing this, then maybe that's something I should care about.

6:09And also, they're the experts. We're the ones selling every day. You have to remember, we probably know more about their business from a technology stack standpoint and what their peers are using within the same org than they do. Then there's the level of confidence that comes in with, no, let's hold the line. Let's ask that extra question. It's not going to offend them because we're giving them credible, relevant information that they actually probably do want to know. And you can tell when you're asking the question, you know, I still prefer on-site to Zoom. You can read body language and you'll be able to tell very quickly if this is resonating with the right audience.

6:45That's a really good answer. And I love what you just said because it kind of went full circle is that that's how you get people to trust you. You listen to their problem, you show up and you have the ability to demonstrate that you know their business. in the kinds of accounts that you're calling on. They have an expectation that you probably know more about what's going on as it relates to the problems you're solving. And if you are getting resistance, you probably haven't. There's a number of things that you could read off that. They probably don't know the answers to the challenges that you're highlighting in their organization, big red flag.

7:26And or they have somebody else that they are relying on to solve that problem, like one of your competitors. So it's, and when you have the ability to sit back and just analyze what they're saying and why they're saying it and what their body language is, I think you just did a, you did a really good job of explaining that, Stuart. And I think that was just really well done where most people don't take the time to do that. They're moving through an agenda. Yeah. Thank you. And one last thing, one other outcome would be, it's not a big enough problem we're solving. There's people that want to play around with toys and POCs all the time, especially in AI era.

8:00Just to say they did a little AI POC. Hey, yeah, I want to do this vector search POC, building a genetic chatbot. But when you're asking those questions, you're either losing to a competitor because they've got a champion in the room that you don't, or they're not understanding the value you're bringing to the table. Or the three is, like, it's just not a problem we're solving. That's okay, too. I tell my team all the time, like, let's qualify out just as quickly as we qualify in. And let's spend our time to attach to big problems because big problems get big dollars assigned to them to fix. And so let's get out.

8:30Let's get your certificate from forest management. You need to get a certificate, bro. If you if you've worked at Mongo for as long as I have, you've got a couple of those things. They redo the training. You get the refresher. Well done.

8:45Stuart Gwynn: Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.