Lesley Ronaldson
speaker
91 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Lesley Ronaldson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And this is in front of 80 people and it's uncomfortable at the start and it's uncomfortable for new people. But Bobby's like, here's where I am. I'm bum, bum, bum. I'm at Red Lions. And someone said, hey, is it a German customer? Oh, I've had one of them. I'll drop by your desk afterwards and we can have a chat. And I'm watching this magic.
I'm watching this tribal knowledge, this peer-to-peer selling. And I actually did do a VP demo. So I said, hey, Bobby, I've done the VP demo. That's going to close on Friday. Call it. Commit it. So there's a little bit of peer pressure there and I welcome that.
You hit the nail on the head. It is magic. And of course, we have a huge gong on the sales floor. And when that deal comes in, we celebrate as a team. And then people go back to their desk, a little spring in their step. It wasn't their win. But again, I want to bring that whole floor on a journey.
I thought you were going in one direction, you went in the other. So the first direction I thought you were going in is selling without integrity. There is absolute cases where we're speaking to a customer saying, we can't do that. What you want our product to do, we cannot do that. And in fact, if they sell the product...
And I had an expression in another company, the refs were selling the dream and leaving the nightmare with the customer success team. If you oversell, you will be caught out. So what I have done in previous companies is if that happens, you'll lose the commission. So there's a bit of a slap on the wrist. If we can't do what the customer needs, you cannot sell the product.
You can't sell a motorbike to somebody who needs a car. It doesn't work. That's the first thing. The second thing, if we feel a competitor can do it better, maybe. And yes, there are cases, but I would ensure, and I've done this in every role, that there is a competitive analysis done for every AE knows what the landscape looks like. There is a battle card for every single competitor.
And I actually can click a top spot and I can go to every single one now. And you need to say to the customer, hey, what you're looking to do, we do it. X may do it better. However, here's where we beat X. And it's da, da, da, and da. You are being honest, but you're gently leading them away from where they were kind of going and saying, it won't do that. Does it really matter?
But it'll do this, this, this, and this. It's up to the customer to make the decision then. But again, it is starting with integrity. The second part of your question is the SDR and the AE. So the SDR has a role and their role is to prospect into as many accounts as possible, bring them on a journey and get them in front of the AE.
The skin in the game for the SDR is they maybe do not care as much about the customer, but they care about them as professionals. They're early in seed and career, they want to get to AE. So what we'll do is if they get to AE,
eight months or nine months and a good track record then we make them a senior we just promoted someone this morning in the huddle then they unlock what we call the sgr ae academy where they then have access to my meetings ae one-to-ones and then they're allowed sell into our very lower lower lower your customer so they get some access to what the role is going to look like
We also sometimes use SDRs to do demos, that selling impacts piece. So do they care about customers? I'm going to say probably not. And I'll say when I was at SDR, I didn't really, I was all about hitting the number. But as they go on the journey and they're selling and they understand it more, they do. The AEs absolutely care about the customer.
So we have just started a center of excellence here. And again, many other customers have it. And what we've done is we've taken our senior director of product marketing, we've moved him in there. Our EMEA head of RevOps, we've moved him in there. And our head of enablement in the US, we've moved them in there.
The reason we picked those three is because the three key personas that buy our product is head of sales, head of revenue, head of enablement. So what they do is they are like our A team. So all six figure deals, We do a center of excellence review. So the US team fly here. We sit in a room for three days. It is a long piece, you know, it is a bit of an investment on time.
But I've never lost a quarter and I do believe it's down to that. So we go in a room, we maybe review 30 to 40 deals over 100K with that center of excellence team. And then they go in and they do the demo. They go on site. They will run the mutual success plan with the AE. It's like a gold standard approach. And then when you move into the customer success item, they become a customer
They don't back away like an AE may do. They are still part of the journey and they've been the executive sponsor to that deal.
I'm going to use my favourite three words. Tell me more.
yes so we've i have examples of that where we say because you're implementing salesforce it's a bit it is a heavy lift to do them both at once so why don't we do salesforce we'll stay aligned check in three months bump bump bump bump bump we also co-sell with hubspot so if hubspot is mentioned we have a joint slash channel with them you like joint lunches with them and we can ping the team there and say hey i'm working with actually we ping their customer success team and say hey
Where are they on their journey? And HubSpot are brilliant. They'll say, you know something, we're only just starting implementation. Hold fire or hey, we're nearly done. Go for it. And by the way, I think you're going to win this, this and this part of the deal. Just sell with integrity. It'll bite you in the ass.
You touched on something about the competitive space. So I think it is a competitive space and it can be quite aggressive. So from a customer centric point of view, I think for us, we just need to be really personalised and personalisation at scale is something a lot of people talk about. So, you know, it's obvious account based marketing.
But making sure customers are getting the best experience and being really innovative. So we need to be five steps ahead of our competitors. I think hence why voice of the customer is key. Those customer advisory forums as well. And also when we launch new products, we love having customers as part of the beta.
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