The Most Influential Women in Sales Share Their Top Tactics and Tips

all right great well let's dive in ladies um what I think our listeners viewers are dying to know right now you know there's been so much talk about the postco consumer how the sales landscape has changed obviously we have ai now we have video tools so we've got all of this change massive change that's accelerating I'd like to hear from you who are out there in the field every day what do you see as the most significant Trends or changes in the sales landscape today and um I would like to go ahead and start with Christina if you could tell me I'm going to start qualitative

um because the biggest thing that I see right now is it's getting harder and harder for sales reps to navigate the buying landscape the personas that should be involved how to actually multi-thread and how to stand out inboxes are overwhelmed LinkedIn messages are overwhelmed there's a lot of different tactics as to how to get through but it's so difficult not to be noise and so I am find finding most folks Now versus what we saw before was the end of the funnel was a little bit harder right we were able to start conversations have conversations but a ton of deals are dropping off in the negotiation phase or post demo but now just getting somebody into the sales funnel is unbelievably difficult and taking longer and longer like we are seeing 30 40 50% higher rates um of just the time it takes from I've initially got this lead or this account in my name to I'm actually able to set a meeting and then whether or not that meeting holds and moves on so early stage deals are totally lagging and it's just very difficult to be able to make any kind of noise or sound or get the attention of buyers right now and this is specifically really impacting early sales people um if you're brand new to this and you don't have the experience of understanding how to start these conversations or what tactics to try we're seeing a lot of people who are just getting into their careers as salespeople that feel like they're drowning because they just can't make any Headway yeah and Christina what do you coach sellers to do about that what are some Strate iies um that any team listening can employ first thing is what I'm finding now is you're going to have a very hard time tapping the economic buyer and getting them to respond to you directly that's almost impossible right now and I think a lot of reps are going right toward how do I get right to that economic buyer and how do I get in their LinkedIn how do I leave them a voicemail how do I send them random swag in the mail that's not the way to do it right now is creating a massive amount of Champions that are willing to have conversations with you and using your internal Champions to multi-thread up also buying the way that buyers want to your sales process and how you want customers to move through your funnel right now is irrelevant you have to meet buyers where they are which means if a buyer enters your funnel and they want to see the product right away you have to show them can't say no no wait before I show you the product I got 15 questions for you like you have to find a way to say okay I'm going to show you the product but I'm going to do Discovery while I demo to get the information that I need and be responsible so we have to be very agile and identify how does this buyer actually want to buy in my sales process I have to put that to the side right now because I have to get them to a point where I can get them back on track so you're always aiming to be the neck but your customer has to be the head right you have to be able to follow them where they go and so it's a three-pronged approach right you can tap the economic buyer and you can get familiarity with them but until someone on their team says hey Christina from Speck has been reaching out to me and we've had a couple conversations this is actually really cool I think you should lean in that's how you get front of funnel action right now so how many champions can you find what can you send to them can you use video to your advantage selling with video is huge right now right when people email in and they're like I'd love to see a demo of the product send them a video of a customized demo where you research their company and you say real quick here's what this could look like right build a movie trailer that's going to elicit curiosity make people lean in and don't start selling until it's time to sell you're selling the sizzle and the Curiosity until it's actually time to

sell the product Kristen I am dying to hear your point of view on you know what new trends are happening now in sales in the sales land landscape what is shifted um because I know you have a lot to say about that so I'd love to hear your view on that to kind of Echo and go a little deeper on you know being buyers being hard to reach um where buyers are placing more emphasis is a trust radius did this study this year that talked about now 60% of buyers are placing emphasis on their own direct experience with your product or service and that they're going to be far more likely to buy if they have used whatever your selling in a past company and so there's either tapping into that direct experience or um I think there's a couple of nuances to that you can use to kind of gain access one is if there are other people in their company who have used you can kind of Leverage other people's experience or you can leverage what their direct competitor is doing with you right when Christina talked about selling the sizzle or sparking curiosity people are always curious ious what other people in their space are doing in the preall you mentioned you know you weren't necessarily interested in one certain product but the sales rep said hey would you like to know what your direct competitors are doing and you're like wait a second yes I would like to know right so these are ways that we can help buyers buy and byy the way they want to buy which is their own experience the experience of someone they know or understanding what's happening in their landscape that they may not have access to but that's a way we can help them is by telling them hey this is what we're seeing with Buyers like you we really need to help sellers today not just have product conversations but to have business conversations and really this takes a different type of seller doesn't it takes somebody who's curious strategic we need to be able to get sellers need to be get able to get on the phone with a customer or a zoom or whatever the case may be and to have that real business conversation what are the trends that are happening right now what are the implications to you and what's the advice that I'm going to give you without maybe trying to sell you anything that's being a trusted adviser right I need to have trust but I also need to have advice right I'm going to flip into um and Raa I want to start with you on this what in your opinion are the top sales tactics that consistently lead to success yeah I

think the um a big one is preparation just selling mtech in S Sales tech for the last 10 years um it used to be that you know buyers didn't have a lot of access to information and so they had to rely on a sales rep even if you were crappy they still have to rely on you to buy what they wanted to buy um and so you could get away with not being very prepared and kind of being not on your best game because they had no other choice but now there's so much Choice um and so as a rep if you really want to add value which you need to do you can't just go through the motions you need to have done research you need to be prepared in terms of having a perspective and opinion on what you think you can you know shed light on that your buyer might not already be aware of it's that type of thing that buyers are looking for it's the little like oh I didn't look at it that way or I didn't know that um and that only comes with putting the right amount of time in before a discovery call before sending an email before a demo and um that will never go out of style and it can be a like made easier with AI and these tools that are coming out but you still have to put the time and thought into being prepared to have a good meaningful conversation every time you meet your buyer but what we need to do today is make sense of all of the information that they already have and teach them what they should be thinking about what questions they should be asking whether they buy from us or not right is really one of those keys and to your point about helping them make sense of it whether they buy from us or not um I think about whenever I take my car to the mechanic there was this one particular mechanic in Austin that uh the reason I went to him is he would tell me the things I didn't need right and so not only did I buy from them and go back to them I referred all sorts of people from them to them right so selling is if you want to actually be successful like sales is a long is a longterm game right like you have to build that equity and help people make sense whether they buy from you right now or not um and I think also going back to your point about the business conversation um refs the way you help people make sense is understanding the businesses and the industries that you sell into and companies would be far better served to help reps have business conversations uh rather than product conversations that would lead to long-term success for the rep and for the company let's go to the seller we've been talking a little bit about the Enterprise I want to now kind of pivot over to the seller Raa what are some common challenges salespeople face right now and how can they overcome them I think one challenge sales people face is there is this push and

pull of volume and then like the volume play and the knowledge that we need to be personalized and thoughtful there in my mind the way I've interpreted this is we are going back to basics you can't shortcut the real work that goes into having meaningful conversations and engagements with your customers you just can't and there's a lot of Technology right now that makes marketers and sellers efficient at their jobs but like are we effective at it and so I think a lot of sellers are getting a message from leadership saying we're not hitting our numbers you have to do more you know you have to know a time and place when to push back and you have to have the data to say that doesn't work um but we aren't all in these positions where we can push back on our leadership you know like right now more than ever I think people are like I want to keep my employment I want to you know I'm not doing so great the economy's hard so like you know you might not have that confidence to push back but we know our customers don't want that volume and we can't do our jobs right with that volume but it's really the total opposite of what our leadership a lot of leadership is asking to do right now so that's a huge challenge for sellers Christina um I would love to hear from you could you tell us about the toughest sale you've ever gotten and what you learned from it

hard to sale I've had so many heartbreaks I still to this day remember deals from 12 years ago that my team lost and when I like see a logo of that company I'm like oh like just it burns you forever no matter what I would say I'm going to go with a theme that's really difficult and hard to get past that you can but it's going to knock you on your butt it's going to make deals slip into the following quarter you're going to get a lot of pressure from your exec leadership and it's when let's say that you're working in the midmarket to the Enterprise right and you have the right people involved in the deal and it's moving along smoothly everybody loves the demo everybody loves the product they're talking about how they're going to use it great news they've got budget approved and they want to spend it with you this is phenomenal so you're doing your diligence you're bringing people in and then you bring in that one person that says you know this is kind of similar to this other tool that I used at a different organization we should look at that tool too and so here you are six months into working this monster deal you have it forecasted you've already spent that commission money in your head instead of buying this outright we still totally want to buy we need to Pilot this for a little bit that's our new motion let's pilot this let's do what POC what does that look like and from there this is like the point of whether you're going to lose the deal or gain the deal because one if they're piloting with you they're putting you through sort of like an RFP type process now at this point right which you were not expecting you did your entire job so now suddenly another competitor is entering the landscape you haven't sold competitively against that competitor because they haven't been a part of it and now you have to figure out terms for the pilot and who's going to be involved and is it going to be a paid pilot and what are the metrics we're going to use to measure that and what if so painful just hearing this Christin like how many of our viewers are just like living this pain right now I'm big thing I will say to bring it up it's happening to you right now chrisy exactly I mean and this is what we are seeing not only in Enterprise but what surprised me the most is now I'm seeing it at midmarket I'm seeing it in SMB I'm having SB customers say you know we have everything approved you're good you're good to go we just got to Pilot this and it gets very dangerous because there was a recent deal that um that we lost because we had all the criteria for the pilot set we started the pilot and a random person came into the pilot and said I don't love that we're measuring this we should be measuring this and It ultimately killed the deal because we didn't have in place what we needed to and more people kept on getting involved so biggest thing is one identify that people are wanting to buy with pilots and poc's ask really early on in the deal how they buy anything not just your product how do you buy anything talk to me about the last piece of technology or tool that you purchased what was the process who was involved what surprised you internally did anything about buying that techer tool surprise you internally and what should we be prepared for in order to do that also start talking about metrics very early your customers do not know how to measure your tool A lot of times your customers don't know how to measure their own problems they look at it under the lens that you are trying to and you have to educate them on hey you have X problem here's how you can actually measure a solution right you have to train your customers because they're not going to come to you and say I don't know how to solve this measure it I don't know what it looks like they're not going to say that so you just have to take on that advisory role and actually teach them and help them and ask the tough questions early I say be a little Truffle Pig and try to find the no before it's a yes right like try to think of every reason why that customer shouldn't buy your product right I'm gonna find the no before I find the yes um and the last thing that I will say is you will be caught off guard you are going to have deals that drop out and it's no fault of yours and you're going to wear it and it's going to be painful but these things happen they've happened to all of us the best sales people in the world have lost Mega deals and had to wear that so all you can say is did I do everything within my power and control and sphere of influence in order to make sure that this was not the outcome you can control the answer to that anything outside of that you can't control and it's okay and I'd like Kristen and Rit to answer this um what key performance indicators should sales teams be monitoring um when I think

about a kpi that means that that is Meaningful to me as a seller it's uh we call them internally a high impact meeting so having a meeting with it it'll depend if you're smv mid-market Enterprise I'm Enterprise so director plus with a director plus person where you talked about something that was like Northstar initiatives you know key metrics for the business it's really digging into initiatives you can align to and having that meeting with someone who likely has some say or influence or even decision making in the deal and so having a sufficient number of those conversations a week a month is something that keeps me on the right track as a seller um what strategies do

you employ for training and developing your sales team I think about it is similar to Shar to one of your points which is um how adults how anyone learns is not by having uh information spoonfed to them but by forc foring them to struggle with it a little bit and what that can mean is just here helping them here's the concept now let's take some time in this learning time to apply what it is that we just learned how will you take this information so folks can do it with this webinar instead of just sitting on this webinar and thinking oh this is a great idea take your notes and find one deal that one of these things that we've talked about applies to maybe it's Christina's point about running POV maybe it's Ras point about preparation um but find one deal that you can apply this to and then go do it because in your working through that application you are going to learn it and you won't just know it for the one deal it helps you're going to know it it's going to be cemented in your brain after that all right Christina give me a 90 seconds okay I'm gonna because it's only 90 seconds I'm going to focus on onboarding and first I'm going to talk about what's broken with onboarding and it's not what everybody thinks that it is everybody attacks onboarding and says oh it's the two weeks of classroom where you're learning everything and you're taking in you know the water hose and and you don't know what you're doing and you get it's there every company needs that initial two weeks of onboarding where you're learning about the company product you're learning about the people that you solve you're handling your HR documentation you are meeting people like you need that two week Deep dive the problem is after that you go sit down at your desk and you go I have no idea how to actually do my job I just learned a lot of things but today I'm supposed to either pick up the phone or send an email or go into my CRM and disposition something some way and I have no idea how to do that and the reality is the forgetting curve is very real right we are going to forget 80% of what we learned within 24 hours and that is consistent it doesn't matter how many times you hear it unless you hear something and then with in 24 hours go do it you forget that and so the answer isn't just memorize everything right the answer isn't memorize everything I remember when I was in grade school one of my teachers said you can't use a calculator on your Calculus test because you're not going to have a calculator in your pocket as an adult so you have to memorize it and they were wrong we all have calculators in our pocket right so it's not about memorize what you have to do and spit it out it's how do we get the learning that you need in front of you at the time that you need it bite-sized and without distraction so um let's start with you Raa um I'd love to hear you're doing so much great work at vidyard again videos changed my lives and I think the lives of many people on this call but what do you see as the future of sales and how do we prepare for that yeah I

might go pretty Niche here it's not like the overall future but I will say one thing is we've put we traditionally in sales put a lot of stock into being live you know in person or live on a zoom I need your time right now and like you said we don't have the attention our buyers might be on the zoom but they're texting and working on deals on their own right I think we need to marry the asynchronous connections and the work we do behind the scenes and put more Merit into that than just the live calls I've had countless deals where I've moved the ball forward overnight time zones you know it might be a video it might be an email it's just making it easier for your buyer they don't need to always be on a call with you I think that's a control tactic of ours and we need to like have that's the preparation and the confidence in our ability to do this and in our educ like our the know knowled we're bringing um it's not the control of being live on a call you need to be able to do things asynchronously too I think the future of sales is what we talked about earlier which is being able to exist in a world where agility is king um it's being able to live in a world where we have the resources that we need to Pivot very quickly and we have the learning that we need at our fingertips when we need it to do the job um and it's open to the fact that your set cemented sales process or methodology doesn't have to be the thing we have to learn how to talk and sell to human beings again and we have to try new things celebrate that we have to not be afraid to get things wrong because in doing that will figure out what is actually right and so I think the rigidity um that we've seen so far in terms of sales and this is the Playbook right like the old sales Playbook is real Dusty and it's okay to take what works from that and say this works but the rest of this doesn't and that's really uncomfortable but we're going to celebrate that so I say celebrate the ambiguity um and celebrate every single little win that you possibly can because they are all important TI into what we've been talking about which is aligning our sales processes wherever we are with the way our buyers want to buy not trying to force them through our funnel through our sales stages through what we think they need to do but really studying our buyers right because if you think about what we experience just individually um every all the cookies on our phones are so personal to us and what we're looking at right that thing that you looked at two days ago follows you around online it's very personal to you right and we have on the B to C side we expect a very high level of personalization and that bleeds over into how we buy everything and so we are seeing that high level of expectation with teams with B2B teams and I think the closer that we can align as Sellers and hopefully as organizations with the way people want to buy the more successful we're going to be have a great week again thank you to these ladies to vidyard and fast forward and make it a great week I'm Sher Leviton saying thank you