20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft

24:03because we were just hanging out with the people we sold to, and they were just, they never had many people to support. I love this detail, so we have this hunter. They sell three months great. How do you do the handoff of, hey, meet an Abelman CS manager, who you've never met before. They're gonna own this relationship now, good luck. That's the second thing we changed. You have to bring this CS team into the selling process. Remember I talked you about the what in the how? This is the S team is the how. So you bring them into the pre -sales process. So the customer can feel comfortable with the customer journey and how you're going to make them successful and they've got the confidence in that So they know what they're buying into early on and then we build these Production environments because we're in a very competitive market and Everybody says they kind of do the same thing with similar value props So we have to go in there and say all right We're going to build this production environment and we're going to line to a use case We're going to build out the business case and then we're going to put it in production and show you exactly how we're going to do this So you're going to understand what it's like to work with us even before your customer our win rate and to that is pretty incredible.

25:05We go into this year, so we made all these changes this year, and I've heard some of the other CROs talk about the hand -off, and they do it after the implementation. You've got to do it as part of the early selling process. What makes us unique is our ability to make our customers successful, meaning they get to the specific outcomes they're looking for, but it's so hard to show that in a sales process, so you've got to actually show that. They've got to see what it's like to work with you. Dude, you have a child that's Chris Dagnan about CS. He goes, you know what I did when I came in this snowflake?

25:34I got rid of all CS. No more CS. I don't believe in it. What do you think of that? I talked about this actually a while ago. Look, I think that the skill set of a CS person is different. When I was, we were at Salesforce back early on in the day, we created this customer success manager. We were the only, we were the first companies to do it. It hasn't changed since then. A lot of customer success organizations are really a first line for support because they're hanging out with the people. Remember I told you about. They're hanging out with the people that they sold the first product to, and they're just answering questions.

26:05They're not able to be proactive. They're not able to get strategic. They're not able to help them get to these outcomes because they're just solving how to problems with like the admins and the operations people. And so I think what Chris is talking about doing is that he probably believes, and I believe this as well, a lot of times when you're losing customers is you lose access to the buyer. You lose access to the people of power. Because you do a deal you're up here, I'll send you're implementing it now you're down here and then when it's implemented now You're down here. You've got to stay up here.

26:35You've got to stay across the organization So how do you how do you stay up there? You've got to change your process You got to change your profile the people you're bringing in the way I was explaining to you is that you've got to change the profile The people you're putting into those into those roles. Do you still need CEOs to close big deals? You said about coming in up here the CEOs need to come in to close large -six figure deals or seven figure One, CEOs should never be RVPs. They should never be the ones that are actually closing deals. That's my job. What they CEOs should give the customer the confidence about our vision of what we are doing as a company.

27:09I'd never like to put my CEO in a position where he's actually having a, he or she is having a closed business. Their job is to align with others, maybe CEO and other executives to give them comfort that they're making the right bet on the right company. They should not be closing business. But I strongly believe when you do big deals, they buy into your company, they buy into your culture, they buy into your innovation, they buy into what you're doing, and you've got so many tentacles within your organization that they buy into you. And it's kind of called the shiny penny, and the way you become the shiny penny of each other's companies and everybody rallies around them.

27:41So it's not just the CEO, it's multiple people in the organization, it's aligning CFOs, it's aligning chief technology officers, it's aligning chief product officers, and it's aligning CEOs. and that's the job, it's the connections. You'll add the sign off to this question while I'm asking. What's the sales playbook T -Steve? I think it's different in each segment. It's different in terms of if you're selling into a commercial business or you're selling into an enterprise business, it's got to be designed and architected into those businesses. It is the kind of gravitational pull that you want to drive within your process to make sure that the sales process is set up so it's on your wheelhouse so everybody's competing with you.

28:18And it's got to be consistent in how you do it. and it's got to be very tactical and very strategic. My job is to architect those across an enterprise business and across a commercial business and make sure that you want to give people some of the flexibility like their managers some flexibility, but they've got to work in your framework. Steve, I need your help on this one. I believe strongly something, many others disagree with me on this. Very different views. The founders should create the sales playbook. Do you agree with me or do you think the sales lead to should create the sales playbook?

28:47The first one. The first one you mean as a startup company? As a startup company, they need to create a sales playbook. What's your messaging? Who's your ICT? How do you sell to them? What's the pricing? I had a conversation with our previous founder Kyle Porter and he was so passionate about our company and our product and our features. And him and I would talk about this a lot. And he'd say, Steve, what I realized when we were you and I met was that I can convince one person to do anything about my product. I can convince one person that our product is the best product ever. But what you helped me do, help us do as a company, is convince multiple people in a company that we can solve their problem and it's great for them and they got to move down the process.

29:26That was kind of an aha moment when I got here. We were about 50 million in revenue and we got there early on just being so passionate about what we do. But we didn't have a process. We were really great about talking about our product and we were a product company at that point. We weren't a platform and we shifted now to be a more of a platform and it's a very different cell. So when you sell a product, what I found is most founders are so passionate about it and passion gets you to a point But at some point you got to get to a point that you need a you need a process and I think most founders are Very passionate what they do Maybe they're more of the product side more of the marketing side But not many have like the experience in a go -to market and like building like an enterprise Company an enterprise process and I think that's a much different world where you need like revops and enablement and and you need to put like infrastructure in place and I don't think that most founders have that experience.

30:19I know it's different for different segments, I know it's different for different companies, but just baseline bastardize it for me. Revops enablement, when's the right time to hire your first in each? Temmeling and revenue, your first massive logo, when's that trigger? So I think Remnoo Apps is probably the most valuable role in a company and you're gonna start to see the evolution of Revops, be moving into the CRO world, when you start bringing data and science together. I think you want to hire an analyst, like a really good analyst early on at about say five million, to really start to analyze your processes, because a great CEO, very passionate, but they get to be able to make decisions based on data, not just based on God.

30:57And by five million, you're gonna start to use some data and some AI that you can start to incorporate to AI. So you want to hire a really smart analyst, and as you grow to 10 million, maybe two analysts, when you get to 20 million, you're gonna need someone who's got some management experience, kind of seeing that ship around really building a strong kind of revops organization. Revops I couldn't survive without a great I've got an incredible revops leader. What do you think Revops gives you so much? The blind spots. They're constantly looking at the data and analyzing the data to understand where their blind spots are.

31:30Can you give me an example? Sorry I know it's detailed but I'm just trying to understand what is an example of a blind spot that a good Revops team would give you. One of the reasons that we changed our processes that I just talked to you about earlier is that we were starting to see based on our data that we were seeing more churn because of the way our process were set up where the AMs were seeing more downgrades but they weren't seeing cancellation. They were seeing more downgrades of users just downgrading in certain segments of the market. So in like companies that we were selling to tech companies that sold to other tech companies.

32:00So we saw that and we had to stop that trend right away. So we started to change our process around a set of customers, a set of data that we saw in the market quickly. That's one example. On Enablement, I had Henry Schuck, the CEO of ZoomInfo, on the show. And he said that actually kind of aligned to what you were saying there about kind of downgrades for not cancellations. He was saying, years passed, people just upgrade more, more seats, more, more seats. Great, wonderful world to live in. Now, not only do they not upgrade, but they want data on usage. Prove to me that you're valuable in my org.

32:31Show me usage, show me whatever that is. transactions, requests, whatever we want. Are you seeing a change in how you structure your team to service the requests of buyers? Yeah, you have to be very proactive about it. It goes back to the skill set you put in the post -seal side so they can start to look at data to show their customers the insights and the value that you're creating for them. And remember the CFO is the buyer now for every renewal. If you're not showing them insights around business value, then you're not going to be renewed. Do you do that continuously throughout the year? Oh, yes.

33:03We've changed our whole adoption strategy to outcomes versus adoption because nobody cares if I come to you and say, here's how many logins you have. Here's how many activities you've had. What you want to know is what is my pipeline metrics been and how am I coming in every quarter to my pipeline targets and what are my outcomes around revenue that I'm driving with your platform. So we've changed our whole adoption metrics to outcome metrics and we know all the leading indicators that get the outcomes and we design health scores around every single one of our customers. And we could see be proactive when it triggers from a green to a yellow and what created that They will all of a sudden start to drive Deliveraging our platform workflow and activity and thought leadership and content out to them and the CSM will follow right up once we see something change You said activity thought leadership content is that a BM like hey Here's actually like marketing material that kind of fits you and kind of could be interesting Or is this like deep analysis on your business use case?

33:59It's deep analysis and their business use case And it's deep analysis. If they get stuck on a three -step cadence, but they're not running it through a five -step cadence, and we see if that's happening, and we see some integrations are off, we can get really proactive and fix them proactively. And then we have these EBRs that we run every quarter with our customers, and we have process in place on how we do that, and we meet with, that's how you get higher in the organization. We meet with the leaders in the organization and show them the insights of what they're doing, with recommendations on how to improve.

34:27What's your biggest advice, as you mentioned with sales loft? Blondie, it's a noisy landscape and there's a lot of people that you say they do the same thing the product messaging and marketing It's quite similar in a lot of cases What would be your biggest advice to founders who are in noisier markets where a lot of people say the same things? You got to focus on the how and you got to stay Monetically focused on the how a lot of companies focus on the what there's a lot of what out there Here's what we do here's our value prop. Here's how we do that focus on like what you're delivering for them And how you're gonna help them but you got to prove it and you got to show them every single day and you've got to be maniacally focused on showing them the how and you got it going back to solving the right business problem but you got to constantly be in front of them showing them how you're helping them how you're helping them hit these targets how you're helping them solve the problems not only when you get the deal done you get the deal done the relationship just starts Steve I got you I love the how I love the how but you know X compared it they're gonna give me a 20 % discount matters nowadays my budget's a tight how do you feel about discounting.

35:28Is that a right time or should it be a flat -nosed? So no, this never be a flat -nosed, but I care more about what's in the contract than how much they're paying us. Meaning, again, our business is being a workflow platform. There's consulting capabilities that we need to bring into the process. There's support and services, pieces in there. And I want to make sure that the relationship is set up so they can be self -sustaining and that we can integrate truly into their workflow. I care more about that. And procurement Here's a lot of what I want to see with my per unit prices. They want to understand what their per unit price is.

36:00So we can work with them on making sure we fit within their budgeting cycle. But I care a lot about making sure the customer is set up for success because I'm negotiating many, many deals right now or all the time. And my point to them would be, yeah, you may look good because you got this per unit price down. But in six months from now, when the business unit comes to you and says, well, I'm not getting any value out of the product, then how are you going to feel then? We've got to figure out a meat somewhere in the middle. Because yeah, well make sure we give you the right structure that's in place I always try to get and I coach my team on you don't want any winners or losers in these negotiations You really want to try to avoid that and you don't want any take it or leave it You want to work with them to figure out at the end of the day how you can both feel good about the relationship Because when procurement leaves when the buying leaves you're focusing on helping to be successful You want to kind of get through the contract, but you don't want a bad contract to take a bad relationship You focus a lot of on relationships Like, you hear this time and time again in the way that you speak.

36:54Something that I find goes against is like, how do we encourage urgency in a deal cycle? How do we encourage urgency, like, close, close, close? And it kind of just feels like it goes against the solving Steve's problem. How do you balance between that needing to close an urgency of closing in a quarter? With, I get it, Steve, it may not be optimal for you to sign right now. You've got this big thing happening. Have another week. How do you balance that urgent with the personal? I think there's a respect component of that where you build relationships and you're working towards a moment in time where you've got to have a tough conversation.

37:29You don't want to have it to be a surprise. You don't want to ever do anything unnatural. But at the end of the day, you know, we do work in months and quarters and there's going to be time throughout the relationship that you're going to ask me for something and I'm going to ask you for something. Right now what I'm asking you for, not to do anything unnatural, but if you can do it in this timeline, we'd appreciate it. You don't have to, but we would really appreciate it. But that's why the mutual plan is so important. And so you're not just having to do something unnatural and throw a hail marry at the end of the quarter end of the month.

37:54I mean, that happens in certain cases. But if you align on the deal reviews and the process and the structure, you're having these conversations and you're allying to or to plan to be able to do something in a timeline that works for both of you. Talk about compelling events and how do you back into compelling events. And, you know, I think that's also really important. But at the end of the day, I do think relationships matter because a procurement person, if they're told what to do by the buyers, they'll work towards those dates. I think you've got to have those relationships because you're going to win and lose a deal 100 times before you actually win it And you're going to feel like you've lost the deals that you've got to be okay with that But you got to pick it up every day and you got to figure out bring it back together because you're going to lose it three or four times during the day You know, you've just got to be able to pick it up And if you don't have those tentacles you go back to CEOs today at the closed business What's really important is that you're not single threading an account and you've got your managers and all different people I call selling as a team sport our organization I've never been in an environment where it's here's your territory go read me the news We make the news together and so it's a team sport we sell together So very rarely do we have a deal that we only have one person in there because there's gonna be a point that you've got to go and Have the tough conversation and you can't be a fr - you can't admire You can't be afraid of it and in some cases things need to get uncomfortable before they get comfortable Are you comfortable having uncomfortable conversation Steve for very my job is to untie knots.

39:12That's my job Have you always been that way? Or did you learn it over time? What I've learned was that you can't be afraid to have the tough conversation. You just, you can never be afraid because if you don't have it, then somebody else will. And this is where you gotta balance things out. Like I've had some of the best sellers in the world when I was a first -time manager. They were the best relationship people, the best. But they couldn't close because they couldn't have the tough conversation. So my job as the RVP in that case was to have those tough conversations and to leverage their strength and leverage my strength.

39:41And so you need that balancing app. You need to do this team. Can you learn to have all conversations? I mean look, some people will never be able to have those tough conversations. Some people won't want to have it. And it doesn't mean that they're not good at what they do. It's just, this is where you may need to tee it up. So someone else can have that tough conversation. Steve, listen, I can tool you all day. I do want to do a quick fire. So I'm going to pat you with questions. Yeah. You're going to give me your thoughts. How does AI impact the future of sales, Steve? AI is going to make people smarter and is going to bring information to them so they have better insights than how to have smarter conversations with their customers.

40:17Will AI replace wraps, revelps, and abulant? I think that will be part to the market that it does replace, like maybe more than some of the transactional business, maybe some of inbound capabilities, but I think we're a bit away from that. I think people are going to be over -rotating in some cases and they're going to learn. Kind of like the IVR. Remember we used to call an IVR and you'd be like press one and you'd speaking to the phone and it wasn't the best experience. I think there's gonna be some of that, but I do think over time it will, but our philosophy and my view is it's gonna give you better insights on what to do next.

40:48What sales tactic has not changed over the last five years? Solving business problems. You still have to be able to always have to be able to solve business problems. What sales tactic has died of death? I think the adage of let's go golfing and hang out on the weekends and go and kind of all those things are just like not as, I think people look at their time and that's changing bit in terms of like the different lunches and the golfing and those things have changed. Tell me about a deal you've closed but you've had to do something creative to get it over the line. Oh, so many. Creativity could be that someone's on vacation and you need to figure out a person on vacation so they will sign the contract because their timeline might not be your contract.

41:29I've had times where people have been skiing and this is where it gets a little. you want to balance out and not be in like creepy, but like you find out where they are in vacation, you might just send them flowers and just, hey, just remember them, they know I'm out there, just remember me, you know, that reps do that where they might find out not in a creepy way because they built the relationships where they've, someone might have been on a ski trip and they, when they got back to the room, they had a bottle of wine there for them or something, just to remind them, and someone says, thanks and they come up for air and they're like, hey, remember me, hey, oh yeah, that's right, I forgot, sorry, I was with my family.

42:02Tell me what one piece of advice would you give to a new sales leader? Someone's starting a new sales leadership role. What would you tell them the night before? This kind of a crazy thing that just kind of came to mind. I saw this quote the other day. So, well, someone gave me advice and I'll tell you what this is. Someone gave me advice when I was in college, same advice. And I walked into a restaurant, I was sitting at the bar with another person who was sitting next to me. And I was waiting for my parents to meet me to go up dinner, where I was just graduating college. And this guy was sitting at a bar and he looks to me and he says, I can be any advice, know your trade before you're ready to move to the next role.

42:33And I had no idea what he was talking about. I'm like, what do you mean, know my trade? Like, what does that really mean? And then it hit me. Like, I started my career. I was in recruiting and then I moved in. I was an SDR. And what he meant was like, know your trade. So when you're an SDR, give really good at being an SDR before you're ready to go into sales. And then give really good at enterprise sales or sales or whatever you're selling before you're ready to move in a management. And I wasn't ready to move into management until I started having kids and I got married because my life changed Like the way I thought about things changed.

43:03I took that advice and I would say don't move until you're ready to move Some people move too quick because if I did that too quick I couldn't give the advice I give to people because I've lived their roles I lived I lived in those roles and I think it's really important that people try to move on too quick I've seen so many first -line managers just want to do anything to be a second -line manager But they're not ready for it. And I've seen sellers who want to be first -ly managers, but they're not ready for it. They're not in a good headspace. Do you think they agree with you that they're ready for it?

43:29Most often they think they are when they're not. Most often they think they are. I think something in some cases, like that's a change within your life. Like if you go, you get married. I'll sudden you have to think differently. You're thinking about you and somebody else. You start to have kids. You're thinking about your thought process changes. So I would give that same advice is that study, be obsessed with what you're trying to do, and be obsessed with learning. And there's this quote I heard the other day is like why is a lion the king of the jungle if you think about it Like why they're not the strongest like the elephant is the strongest They're not the fastest the Cheetah is the fastest there's many animals that are smarter than them in the jungle But they're obsessed with winning and I think that's what people they need to be obsessed with learning They need to be obsessed with improving.

44:11They need to be incess with improving and when I see people do deals Big deals is because they're obsessed with the customer or they're obsessed with the relationship, and they're maniacally focused, and they're gonna do it every day, possibly get a win. There's people that need to lose, but there's not many of you that really know how to win. You gotta be obsessed with winning. I always say you have to earn the right to do the next thing, and I think that's very similar to the know your trade. How did having children change your operating mindset towards what? Well, that's sales people are selfish.

44:36They're selfish with their time. I don't think there's any better job than being an enterprise salesperson with a great company and a great market with a great product. All I gotta do is think about myself, my schedule, my time, my schedule, that's all I cared about. But when I started out with kids, my personal schedule changed. I had to be a little more organized. I had to think for other people. I had now three kids. I had to think about them and my family. And it started to get me thinking, you go from catching the ball on the end zone as a seller to be on the sideline coach and the team and being able to be having kids.

45:08I'm trying to teach them and help them. And it just changed me to thinking, I want to help coach people and coach sales people to get them to be the best of them. Like now I love watching people improve. I love watching people get promoted. I love. I love if I say something and all of a sudden I see them put it in action or they tell me what they did and through a coaching initiative. I love that. I wasn't thinking like that before it kids. It was all about me. Now I final one otherwise I can just keep going all day but it's what company sales strategy around you that you've seen. Do you go, huh?

45:39That's really impressive. I'm impressed by that. I've worked at many companies back in the day where we were at Salesforce. I think Salesforce did it so good. Like, that's been almost 10 years of Salesforce. I know that you had a, and I listen to your interview with Mark Benioff, and he cultivated such a culture of perfection that people wanted to win for him. He cultivated so many incredible leaders, and that company just had such an incredible sales process because you think about our market. You can say, well, at that point, C -Bull and Oracle were the big people -soft, SAP, Microsoft. They were the, they know and even knew about Salesforce.

46:15Do you just create so much talent around a process that we built a process around helping companies be more agile, be more flexible for your day of the cloud? Were you crazy for your day in the cup? Well, our sales process was around trust us. It will show you our security. We'll show you our uptime and downtime in the market. And we would be very transparent with our customers. And we just had such an incredible sales process, designed and built around what made us great and made us unique, that nobody could compete. Steve, I didn't send you the schedule before this show, which was very uncharacteristic of us.

46:46Normally we do. I'm really pleased that I didn't, because you would have gone, that was not what we agreed upon in the schedule. These shows are really why I loved doing what I do. It's so great to have such a natural discussion. Thank you so much for being so brilliant and I just love this. No, I loved it. I appreciate the conversation and that just This flowed nice and I appreciate your curiosity, by the way. That was so much fun to do as Steve. I love the way the conversation just flowed so naturally as I said I'm super pleased that he did not see the schedule beforehand because none of that was intended but it was so much fun to do.

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