On Topline, Mark Roberge says the first milestone for AI in go-to-market is lifting rep selling time from about 25% to 80%, which could roughly triple productivity.
Brad says the freed time lets top reps learn from the best people, study their process and spend time in customers' offices. He says AI makes the best reps much more productive, while average reps can level up by removing manual work like QBR decks and research.
“they have automated their like daily and weekly processes. So their prospecting list, their LinkedIn outreach, their, you know, creation of customer value decks, etc, like all of that happens.”
Christopher says that with AI note-takers the seller can pay full attention, build personal rapport and go deep in discovery. If something is missed it will 'pop up and remind us', and if another channel has already answered a question it doesn't need to be asked again. The seller can focus on what is still unknown about how this prospect could succeed.
“We can get very deep into discovery because we know that if we miss something in discovery, it's gonna pop up and remind us.”
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Amanda Kahlow says her sellers usually go away after a call and take another week to produce a perspective slide, and she says that lost time kills deals. Her superhuman builds the slide and an ROI calculator in the moment, based on what the buyer said about their business and pain points. The aim is to give the human seller the tools to move the deal forward immediately.
“Usually our sellers go away and build that themselves and it takes them another week to get that out and then all like time is lost, time kills all deals.”
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Kropp said any time sales teams spend on preparing for calls, documenting meetings, following up, or preparing quotes is toil. He said humans should manage customer relationships and think about strategy and how to sell, while AI does the rest.
“That's all waste, toil.”
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Daniel said his forecast is due in Salesforce each Thursday before a Friday call. He uses Glean agents to pull recent emails and call recordings and push the next steps into Salesforce, and he said they no longer have to give their manager verbal updates on deals throughout the week.
“you could actually take the call recording Upload it to our Salesforce update agent that we have”
He said the research and information gathering reps used to do is now automated, so salespeople can spend their time with customers rather than back-office work. He pointed to teams he managed in previous roles where people spent more than half their week on Salesforce hygiene and updating Salesforce, and said those days are gone.
“like Salesforce hygiene and people spending more than half their week updating Salesforce.”
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McMahon says the remaining 75 to 80 percent goes to admin, updating the tech stack, researching customers and use cases, and coordinating calendars and information. He believes AI can at least halve that non-selling work, which could lift selling time to 50 to 75 percent. Alex agrees.
“I'm spending 80 % of my time doing that crap that AI can help me at least cut in half, maybe even more.”
Kyle Norton says that to speed up the funnel, his team uses AI to do the research and fill in the information so the rep does not need to research before dialing. The BDR gets exactly what they need, which he describes as two or three things to say rather than 20. He says that from there the team can test different pattern interrupts and value offers.
“make sure that the rep doesn't have to do any research before picking up the phone and calling.”
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Mark defined selling time as the share of a rep's week spent face to face or on Zoom with a customer or prospect. He said this is possible today but not easy. He said that if admin work is removed while skills, demand and product-market fit stay the same, rep productivity could roughly triple.
“what is accessible to unlock massive efficiency improvements in every go to market org is first milestone drive selling time from 25 % to 80%”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Episode Sales process & deals Link to this
The speaker says many productivity unlocks come from very generic tools doing simple things that used to take a lot of time. The speaker says the massive unlock has come from freeing salespeople from admin so they have more time for what they are good at, and that AI CRM or modules from HubSpot or Salesforce could be a later form of this.
“the massive unlock has come from simple things being done for these people to give them more time to do what they're really good at”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Episode Sales process & deals Link to this
Dmitri said using Perplexity before a meeting to research the company and the person can save a lot of prep time. He said many of the discovery questions a rep would ask in the meeting can be answered ahead of time, with maybe 80% of the answer available in advance.
“you can actually get maybe 80 % of the answer ahead of time.”
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On Topline, Keenan says nobody buys unless they see their current state as untenable, and teams over-invest in training selling behaviour.
He first asks whether the retailer sells mainly through everyday pricing (a Walmart-esque model with infrequent promos) or high-low promotion like some grocers, whether it has seasonality and one-time buys, and whether it relies on markdowns. He says markdowns can be a huge drag on margin and a lot of work to manage. He describes his role as coming in to solve problems rather than sell.
“I just try to understand how they go to market to their end consumer from a pricing perspective. And then I just try to come, I truthfully just come to be a problem solver”
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McMahon said that if a seller moves too fast through discovery, the customer may grasp what the product does and then withhold the metrics needed for a compelling ROI or value proposition. He said the buyer does this because they know what the seller is doing to them, which makes it harder to justify price and the purchase later.
“I've seen it where the customers now unwilling to give you the metrics required for you to create a compelling ROI or value proposition because they know what you're doing to them.”
He said that in his operating system the question is whether the rep got a defined problem, starting from the organisation's root causes. The definition covers how many root causes there are, how often each occurs, the downstream impact and whose impact it is, internal or external. He said the aim is to see the problem defined in the buyer's terms.
“we're looking for, did you get a defined problem?”
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He called this sales physics and said nobody buys anything unless that condition holds. He argued that teams over-invest in training the behaviour of selling and under-invest in understanding what the customer experiences and what would drive them to switch. He said a good system helps the buyer recognise that state, which allows the deal to close.
“nobody buys anything unless their current state is untenable and intolerable.”
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Rick contrasts the past, when product expertise won because information was scarce and product knowledge had to be installed and taught by the vendor, with today, when information is everywhere and switching costs are low. He says sellers now need industry expertise, knowledge of where CFOs will spend, and alignment to customer outcomes. He says the methodology used by leaders such as John McMahon is about creating customer value by uncovering problems worth solving.
“the winner is in somebody that can actually diagnose the problem better than the actual buyer can do it themselves.”
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Randy says false velocity is one of the things that screws deals most, because a seller who does not slow down early cannot keep the deal out of danger later. He says reps should discover the customer's pain or problem that they can then solve, rather than throwing product features at the buyer. He sums this up as slowing down to speed up.
“I think one of the things that screws deals immensely is false velocity at the front end.”
Stuart says good reps sit in discovery and ask follow-up questions to understand implication, such as what happens if you do nothing or if the outcome is achieved. He coaches inside reps to follow the money and ask how a change would make or save the customer money, a method he used while covering a large bank at MongoDB.
“the biggest two words I like to say is, so what?”
Stuart says a rep has to do this work in discovery to have an educated opinion that an executive will listen to and partner on. He describes listening with intellectual curiosity and in a personal way, rather than treating discovery as filling out the capture sheet MongoDB uses.
“I think the most important stage in you know, sales process is discovery.”
Kaplan describes what he and his team call seller deficit disorder. It is based on buyer surveys where the first complaint is that the seller does not understand my business and the second is that the seller does not listen. He says these complaints have been the core ones for thousands of years, and that sellers pitch from an inside-out view rather than trying to understand the buyer first.
“when they survey buyers, the first thing they come back and say, you don't understand my business.”
Usha says HiveBright used to use the SPICE framework, which put reps into a mindset of asking budget questions on the first call. She says this is not necessary in her view, because budget will come up quickly anyway. She recommends finding the pain point, the problem to solve and the impact it can create before moving into the commercial process.
“it's not necessary in my mind. You will get to it anyway very quickly.”
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Usha uses an event example to show how a product mindset digs deeper: asking what kind of event it is, how long it runs, how many attendees it has and how the agenda is typically structured. She says the goal is to find where the most value is created and solve for that. She lists this alongside, but separately from, thinking from first principles and not applying patterns or frameworks right away.
“don't leave it at a superficial level, try and ask deeper questions to really understand where is the most value getting created”
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Michelle said customers will tell you how to sell to them if you ask the right questions. Her sequence is to understand the pain, then present phase one, phase two and phase three, the sales process, implementation, the long-term picture and what it will cost.
“Here's phase one, phase two, phase three. Here's what it looks like through the sales process.”
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Mark says the instinctive first slide is about the company, its years in business, customer count and funding raised, and that this is wrong. He says the first slide should recap what you have learned, for example that the customer is losing market share because demand generation has fallen apart, and then ask whether you have it right. He hopes even the CEO disagrees, because that opens a conversation that is hard to have in a group meeting.
“the first slide is a recap of what you know about their situation”
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Ron Gabrisko says early on at Databricks his selling was less about the pitch and more about discovery and asking questions. He says messaging was too technical, so it had to help customers understand how to use the product rather than starting from a blank sheet. He describes a common belief among technical founders that the best product at the lowest price will win the whole market, and says that belief is wrong.
“sales people need to teach your customers how to use it and how to get value out of it.”
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Mark Bersh says that when a founder moves to selling and thinks it needs a sales process, they usually build a deck covering what was built, the features and benefits, and the problems solved. He calls this an inside-out approach and argues it goes against sales research. He recommends an outside-in process that focuses on how the buyer sees the world before they know the product exists.
“It's what I call an inside out approach.”
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Sangeeta describes the enterprise method: uncover the pain more deeply than the customer first says, paint a positive vision with the implications of not acting, and show what the product needs to succeed. The result is a business case for the executive buyer, a timeline worked backwards from the outcomes, and metrics that show success. She calls it a tried and tested sales methodology.
“So the net result is you're painting a vision, you're helping the customer understand the exact characteristics of how this process would look like, you also help them understand the metrics that will show success.”
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Andrew said a salesperson cannot simply sell to developers and must first show they can help and have empathy for the problems. Once the seller understands the user journey and the pain in the buyer's environment, they can understand the impact they could have. He described this as qualification led by technical understanding rather than by sales process.
“once you understand that user journey, you can understand the pain that they're in, in their environment, their situation, ultimately the impact you could have”
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Mark role-played a rep who accepted that a prospect needed to be SOC 2 compliant next week and was the decision maker. Stevie, as the manager, asked why it was urgent and whether the rep knew why. Mark praised this, said you keep going because the why often will not be there at first, and compared it to a two-year-old asking why until the answer reaches a business reason.
“They're like, okay, why do they want to buy? Well, they're trying to get SOC 2 compliant. Okay, why do they want SOC 2 compliance?”
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On The Science of Scaling, Andy Shorkey says Writer's enterprise deals have two sponsors: the line of business owns outcomes and the CIO owns platform standardization.
He calls this a '360 approach' to reaching both blockers and advocates. He lists the IT team, the CFO group (for ROI), business teams and merchants. He notes you can't always get access and that salespeople sometimes simply forget.
“You want to hit the IT teams, the CFO group to talk about, you know, the ROI, the business teams, the merchants. You want to cover off on all of that. And it's one, you can't always get access, but two, you forget like you're human.”
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Gary said a seller should not stop after finding one champion but should find many champions throughout the process, because winning the collective yes in today's larger, more political organizations requires it. Another speaker then added that technical software deals can involve technical and political champions, and that a political champion may not be able to tell the financial metrics story.
“je vindt veel champions door de proces ook”
The speaker said that if you are single-threaded on one person you are at risk, and that while sellers could once be more single-threaded with an economic buyer, they had not seen single-threaded deals in years.
“single -threaded, je bent op het risico”
Sam Costello says Harness sells a technical platform of 14 products, so it usually has to win two to three champions per deal. These are a platform team that built the tooling, a developer or engineering team consuming it, and a security team with standards and governance it wants followed. He says that without technical mindshare in each of those places, the deal will get stuck.
“we must go win usually two to three champions to do a deal”
Bove says the team realised they were missing executive champions and had not understood the customer's why or ideal future state. They mapped the current state to the future state, met more people, and stopped being single-threaded, then closed a much larger deal on a shorter timeline, which she says has happened on several deals.
“We weren't single threaded anymore.”
At Lacework Daniel sold to security owners, IT, DevOps and cloud ops, and development leaders, because each group had a different role in the decision. He said the more he built a ground swell across these groups, the more business value he could support for a higher deal size, and the faster the deal moved.
“moves my deal. much faster than just going single-threaded into the account.”
Kaplan said multi-threading is non-negotiable today and that a seller who has one champion in an account will be in jeopardy. He framed this as a reason to keep the principles of qualification active rather than treating them as a checkbox.
“If you're not multi-threading, you're going to be in jeopardy.”
Alex says that after the technical team wins the math, the business win still has to be built with infrastructure owners, product leaders, engineering and other technical experts, each of whom can win logic battles. He says the AE must listen, find where the value is and command a premium for the fastest tokens.
“But the AE has got to be an extreme orchestrator.”
Carlos said some reps found projects being built, identified the line-of-business owner and explained how MongoDB would help that business get to market faster and realise revenue sooner. Doing this early in the cycle made deals move quickly, whereas dealing only with developers and IT ops took much longer.
“If I do that early in my sales cycle, my sales cycle goes super fast, where if I deal with just the developers and the IT ops people, it's going to take a lot longer.”
Writer originally sold mainly to line-of-business buyers such as marketing and UX teams. As demand for AI surged, CIOs and heads of AI became more prevalent sponsors because they had to get their arms around all the tooling options. Andy Shorkey says Writer evolved its playbook to engage CIOs, heads of AI and other technical stakeholders directly, while continuing to drive outcomes for the line of business, which could be the CRO, CFO or CMO.
“ultimately in our world, we have two executive sponsors.”
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Donald Kelly said the Formlabs rep was not getting everyone engaged in dental sales. He needed to get past gatekeepers to office managers, get doctors engaged, engage people working directly with patients, and do so early in the process. Mark added that each member of the decision-making unit cares about different things, for example the doctor about patient care and the CFO about price.
“The doctor cares about like, I'm going to get patient care up. I need to do my job easily.”
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He gave this figure, hedged with 'I think', while describing a manager who notices across a rep's whole pipeline that the rep does not multi-thread well, and then uses the one-on-one to focus on that theme.
“we know from Gong that that affects win rates by 23%”
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On The Science of Scaling, Mark Roberge called customers who switched from competitors and asked each to take about one reference call a month for competitive deals.
She works with reps to find later-stage prospects facing problems similar to the customers on the panel. She preps panelists beforehand and pairs a CS leader or strong CSM with a rep as moderators, and always opens up Q&A. She asks panelists not to sugarcoat, for example saying if the sales process was too long or procurement was never discussed, so the team learns how the experience could have been better. Customers and prospects have stayed for closing night parties.
“pro tip, put customers No matter what happens, that prospect always gets old. I've never had a situation where you put a prospect on stage and they're like, eh”
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He explained that people who have reached a late stage of evaluation often want to talk to unbiased references, even though those references may be paid or may be investors. He said the underlying purpose is to reduce anxiety about whether what they have been told is accurate. He presented this as a buyer pattern he experiences himself.
“they know that you do that because you're paid to do that”
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Randy says that in the final zone the champion is going to be getting nervous, so the seller has to be texting them daily and hold their hand. He lists customer referrals, executive alignment and execution excellence on the seller's side as the things that must go very well. He says the buyer has already decided about the product and agreed to the business case by this point, so the work is about the buyer's confidence.
“We have to be texting with our champion on a daily basis at this zone because they are going to be getting nervous.”
Mandia calls this the dirty secret of enterprise sales, especially in security. He says winning large brands such as JP Morgan, Exxon, Walmart and Target leads others to want the same product. He says he saw this effect at FireEye and that it applies to companies like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks.
“Everybody buys what everybody else bought.”
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Even while closing hundreds of customers a quarter, Roberge called the few who switched from a competitor, asked why they switched, gave them his cell phone and offered dinner or coffee when in their city. In return he asked that, about once a month, they speak with a prospect weighing that competitor, and he trained reps to offer prospects a call with a customer who had used both. He says he believes he learned this from Salesforce.
“If we have a customer that's considering competitor A and us, I want my salespeople to be trained to say, hey, would you like to talk to a customer that's used both?”
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Ranked by how many independent voices make each point and how specific their evidence is. Co-hosts of a show count as one voice, and a point needs at least two shows to appear here.
said Brad Scott (Revenue Builders), Christopher O'Donnell (The Science of Scaling), Amanda Kahlow (Topline), Matthew Kropp ([Un]Churned), Daniel Simon (Revenue Builders), Ghazi Masood (The Revenue Leadership Podcast) and 4 more
Brad says the freed time lets top reps learn from the best people, study their process and spend time in customers' offices. He says AI makes the best reps much more productive, while average reps can level up by removing manual work like QBR decks and research.
“they have automated their like daily and weekly processes. So their prospecting list, their LinkedIn outreach, their, you know, creation of customer value decks, etc, like all of that happens.”
Christopher says that with AI note-takers the seller can pay full attention, build personal rapport and go deep in discovery. If something is missed it will 'pop up and remind us', and if another channel has already answered a question it doesn't need to be asked again. The seller can focus on what is still unknown about how this prospect could succeed.
“We can get very deep into discovery because we know that if we miss something in discovery, it's gonna pop up and remind us.”
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Amanda Kahlow says her sellers usually go away after a call and take another week to produce a perspective slide, and she says that lost time kills deals. Her superhuman builds the slide and an ROI calculator in the moment, based on what the buyer said about their business and pain points. The aim is to give the human seller the tools to move the deal forward immediately.
“Usually our sellers go away and build that themselves and it takes them another week to get that out and then all like time is lost, time kills all deals.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Episode Sales process & deals Link to this
Kropp said any time sales teams spend on preparing for calls, documenting meetings, following up, or preparing quotes is toil. He said humans should manage customer relationships and think about strategy and how to sell, while AI does the rest.
“That's all waste, toil.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Episode Sales process & deals Link to this
Daniel said his forecast is due in Salesforce each Thursday before a Friday call. He uses Glean agents to pull recent emails and call recordings and push the next steps into Salesforce, and he said they no longer have to give their manager verbal updates on deals throughout the week.
“you could actually take the call recording Upload it to our Salesforce update agent that we have”
He said the research and information gathering reps used to do is now automated, so salespeople can spend their time with customers rather than back-office work. He pointed to teams he managed in previous roles where people spent more than half their week on Salesforce hygiene and updating Salesforce, and said those days are gone.
“like Salesforce hygiene and people spending more than half their week updating Salesforce.”
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McMahon says the remaining 75 to 80 percent goes to admin, updating the tech stack, researching customers and use cases, and coordinating calendars and information. He believes AI can at least halve that non-selling work, which could lift selling time to 50 to 75 percent. Alex agrees.
“I'm spending 80 % of my time doing that crap that AI can help me at least cut in half, maybe even more.”
Kyle Norton says that to speed up the funnel, his team uses AI to do the research and fill in the information so the rep does not need to research before dialing. The BDR gets exactly what they need, which he describes as two or three things to say rather than 20. He says that from there the team can test different pattern interrupts and value offers.
“make sure that the rep doesn't have to do any research before picking up the phone and calling.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Episode Sales process & deals Link to this
Mark defined selling time as the share of a rep's week spent face to face or on Zoom with a customer or prospect. He said this is possible today but not easy. He said that if admin work is removed while skills, demand and product-market fit stay the same, rep productivity could roughly triple.
“what is accessible to unlock massive efficiency improvements in every go to market org is first milestone drive selling time from 25 % to 80%”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Episode Sales process & deals Link to this
The speaker says many productivity unlocks come from very generic tools doing simple things that used to take a lot of time. The speaker says the massive unlock has come from freeing salespeople from admin so they have more time for what they are good at, and that AI CRM or modules from HubSpot or Salesforce could be a later form of this.
“the massive unlock has come from simple things being done for these people to give them more time to do what they're really good at”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Episode Sales process & deals Link to this
Dmitri said using Perplexity before a meeting to research the company and the person can save a lot of prep time. He said many of the discovery questions a rep would ask in the meeting can be answered ahead of time, with maybe 80% of the answer available in advance.
“you can actually get maybe 80 % of the answer ahead of time.”
Listen on Apple Podcasts Episode Sales process & deals Link to this
said Rick Smolen (Topline), Jeremey Donovan (The Revenue Leadership Podcast)
Rick says sellers need time after a call to think through next steps and strategy. He says he does not agree with a target of putting sellers on the phone with customers 85% of the time. He frames this as a reason sellers should not hand note-taking or processing entirely to a tool.
“the magic in sales is often happening between the meetings”
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Rick argues that a seller's notes are where they process what happened and decide the next action, and that an AI note-taker captures much of the objective content but not the buyer's reactions. He cited an old study he could not detail, in which computer-scored tests gave results without the context teachers had when grading by hand. He warns that a seller who treats note-taking as saved time may see performance decline.
“the computer can't capture the tone, can't capture the nuance, can't capture the content”
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Jeremey Donovan said the company used a tool, homegrown or licensed, that pulled the MEDDIC framework from call transcripts and pasted it into Salesforce. He said it did a near-perfect job, but full replacement of that human step was not effective, and he said the company took the tool out of commission. He thinks an augmented approach probably works better.
“The good news is whatever they were doing again in -house versus tool did a perfect job, near perfect job.”
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Those focused on efficiency see admin as pure waste, while those focused on complex deals see note-taking and reflection as where sellers form strategy.
said Mark Roberge (The Science of Scaling), Randy Riemersma (Revenue Builders), Jason Forget (Revenue Builders), Jeremey Donovan (The Revenue Leadership Podcast), Frederic Kerrest (The Science of Scaling)
BANT covers budget, authority, need and timing. MEDDIC covers metrics, economic buyer, decision process, decision-making unit, identify pain and champion. Mark says enterprise needs a more consultative seller who understands champions and internal politics.
“In SMB, we often use BANT, which is budget, authority, need, timing, because it's one person. In enterprise, we often use MEDDIC.”
Randy describes a deal inspection process he calls MEDDIC, and says he asks reps early on to explain the identified business pain, the champion and the economic buyer. He says the pain should matter and ideally tie back to a corporate objective, and the economic buyer should have discretionary use of funds. He says if the problem sponsor is weak, the rest of the deal slows down.
“If we don't have a strong problem sponsor, then the rest of the deal is also going to get slowed down or, you know, lacks the momentum, the energy behind that we want.”
Jason said that as a company grows and adds sales managers, each one must vet deals the same way. Otherwise leaders cannot know the quality of the pipeline, such as who the economic buyer is or whether the champion will act. He said consistent qualification improves intel on win rate and loss rate, which then lets the company train, enable and hire managers.
“if every deal is vetted differently, then I don't actually know the quality of my pipeline and therefore I don't know how predictable I really am”
He said that in the survey, the most common sales qualification and deal inspection framework is MEDDIC, MEDPIC or a variation, especially in upper mid-market to enterprise sales. He said his first steps would be rigorous MEDDIC deal inspection, then disciplined pipeline generation with time carved out, then checking that the company is going after the ICP it thinks it is.
“if I could do one thing, it would be incredibly disciplined, weekly. deal reviews.”
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Roberge lists options: BANT (budget, authority, need, timing), which he has most people start with, especially outside enterprise; MEDDIC for complex enterprise deals; Winning by Design's SPICED (situation, pain, impact, critical event, decision); and GPCT (goal, plan, challenge, timeline), which HubSpot used and which he calls great for discovery. You can then add or remove a letter to fit your business, as Okta did with MEDDPIC.
“Other popular ones, BANT, budget, authority, need timing. Super simple. I like to have most people start there, especially if you're not doing enterprise sales.”
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Kerrest's qualification questions include: who is buying and why, what their process is, whether you are replacing something or opening a greenfield category (evangelical sell versus a 10x better mousetrap), who your coach is versus your champion, and who is trying to block you when you're not in the room. He says any innovative product is guaranteed to upset someone's apple cart.
“And by the way, who's trying to jam you when you're not there? You're guaranteed whatever super innovative product you're bringing to market is going to upset someone's apple cart.”
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Kerrest says he has heard this from technical founder-CEOs multiple times this week already. He argues sales methodologies refined over the past 20 years are very useful to today's technical founders and advocates something simple like MEDDIC.
“I have a deck that explains what my product does. That's my sales process.”
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Paul says the pre-sales team was working deals without a method for finding who the decision makers were or what their criteria were, so when a deal came in it was a guessing game. He says there was never a science to it, which he saw as a gap in the sales process.
“There was never a sort of a science to it.”
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said Kyle Norton (The Revenue Leadership Podcast), Justin Shriber (Topline), Jason Forget (Revenue Builders)
In a high-velocity SMB environment, he found off-the-shelf options either too pushy or too enterprise, such as Command of the Message. His team combined elements of methodologies he liked with specific lines and approaches that worked in the field, and trained using call clips of top reps. It took heavy time from the AE, BDR and enablement leaders, managers and reps. He said adoption came because the playbook was built from the reps outward rather than imposed.
“And it wasn't because they were executing the playbook. It was because the playbook was like built on them.”
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He described the first use case Terret tends to start with: a leader who wants to know why deals are lost and what closers do differently. The goal is to capture that approach as a playbook and then make sure the rest of the team adopts it.
“I want to know what my closers are doing differently. I want a playbook that actually bottles up that secret sauce.”
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Jason said that in the early 2000s he came to believe selling is an art form for the top handful of sellers but a science for everyone else. He said his finance and process background led him to turn the art into a system that leaders and reps can use. He credited the approach with his move into RevOps and then sales leadership.
“as much as it's selling as an art form for the top five or 10 % of sellers, it truly is a science for the rest.”
Jonathan said that if playbooks were that simple, any company could be taken to a billion-dollar company easily. He said every product and every demo is different, so a leader should not arrive with a ready-made playbook.
“Every company is different. So if the playbook was that simple, you could take any company to a billion dollar company.”
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Standard frameworks fit complex enterprise deals, while high-velocity SMB motions find them too heavy and do better with playbooks built from their own reps.
What one named guest described doing or seeing. Each is a single account, not a point several operators agree on.
“So I'm like, this is Kade from Common Room. I'm calling to book a meeting with you.”
“we're currently working with the engineering team, one of your organizations. I saw you swing by my profile and simply wanted to say hello.”
“I'm going to bring a monetization consultant. Somebody has worked at Simon-Kucher, McKinsey, BCG, or whatever, and he's going to sit down with you and do a quick back of the envelope design of how your pricing should be before I sell you anything.”
“we convert um 70% of like trials to paid customers”
“Can we talk to HR? Can we talk to your chief people officer? What are you guys doing to bring in fresh young minds?”
“they're leaving kickoff with their plan for the quarter, their territory plan, their account plans and understanding, here's my number and here's what I need to do to hit it.”
Mark gives a sample script asking the champion to tell about the last time they got a million-dollar deal through the company, then probing who they worked with, who handles procurement and legal, and what those people's red lines are. He says a strong champion answers confidently because they have done it before. If the champion lacks the answers, he says you ask who would know, and you move on to that person while keeping the relationship friendly.
“Tell me about the last time you got a million dollar deal through this company.”
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Mark Raberge said a great champion is willing and able, and that his mentor John McMahon taught him to ask whether they are able. He suggested asking who the security contact is, what questions they will ask and what the right answers are, what happens if security delays for three months, and where procurement will push. The answers show whether the champion can get the deal done.
“They're all willing, but are they able?”
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Stuart says a true champion will work with him to get the answer, or will introduce him to the executive buyer, and together they document how the solution saves money, earns money, or speeds revenue or time to market. If the person cannot answer or will not go get the answer, he treats them as a coach rather than a champion. He says quantifying pain depends on having a champion, since no champion means no deal.
“Are they really a champion or are they a coach? If they're a coach, they're either not going to have the answer or they're not willing to go get that answer.”
The speaker said a deal will not close if the contact helping the seller is a coach without the power or budget to push the purchase through. They said this is common, and that many people believe they have a champion when they only have a coach.
“Als mensen denken dat ze een champion hebben, dan hebben ze een coach.”
Sam Costello lists the checks Harness runs before a POV: whether there is at least one champion and ideally several, whether the POV criteria are well defined and the team is highly differentiated, whether the economic buyer would discuss changes if the criteria changed, and whether the team knows its competitors. He says the global SE leader and he both sign off on each POV, and that competition is often a customer choosing to do nothing.
“do we have champion, at least one, but multiple champions ideally?”
Sam Costello says that before the POV, the team should check with the economic buyer whether this is the problem they care about, whether these are the criteria they want to see, and whether they have faith in the straw-man business case, which may only need to be directionally accurate. He also asks whether other people need to be involved.
“is going to see the economic buyer before you do the POV”
Gary listed these five things and said she does not walk into a proof of value without having all of them nailed down. She said the process needs to cover who the people are, where they go through the process, what technology will be measured, the timing, and the metrics.
“So there's five things i think about in terms oe going into a proof of value.”
Brad says that early on, when companies are begging for people to talk to them, they run into proofs of value that drag on. Four months later they have spent sales, engineering and product time and have nothing, and the deal sits on the forecast for quarters, which is why Glean now sets checkpoints.
“And then it's four months later, you've sunk all of your time, all of your engineers time”
Brad says the second stage of Glean's sales process is the blueprint process, where the team sits with business units such as sales, engineering and legal to map how work gets done today. They then ask whether transforming that process has value and ties to the outcomes the customer wants, and only after the economic buyer is on board do they plug in data sources and systems for a proof of value.
“we call the blueprint process, we actually come into your office, we sit down with you”
Sam Costello says the ideal POV is tied to a business case that states the value of solving the problem, even if it is not fully baked. The POV is then designed to prove the points in that case, with a metric such as how long a task took before and how long it takes now. He describes creating this linkage as the most important step.
“it used to take this long to do it, now it takes this long”
Bob Kocis said the strongest deals had a unique value proposition that the customer helped build and therefore owns, which he said makes deals ironclad. He warned that an ROI calculator nobody owns is not enough, and that if quantifying questions come too late, the customer has already built their own justification. He said the work has to be done up front.
“it has to be owned by you and the company that's buying from you and your champion, right?”
McMahon said that if a seller moves too fast through discovery, the customer may grasp what the product does and then withhold the metrics needed for a compelling ROI or value proposition. He said the buyer does this because they know what the seller is doing to them, which makes it harder to justify price and the purchase later.
“I've seen it where the customers now unwilling to give you the metrics required for you to create a compelling ROI or value proposition because they know what you're doing to them.”
McKenna's example has Armand as the champion and Nick as the decision maker. Rather than asking what Nick will care about, she asks Armand about this year's priorities, forecast, growth, roadmap and plan. She expects Armand to say Nick is better placed to answer and offer to bring him in. The show notes list this as a main takeaway: ask questions the champion may not know so they involve higher-ups.
“Start asking questions that Armand can't answer instead of being like, what's Nick gonna care about?”
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Bove says the team realised they were missing executive champions and had not understood the customer's why or ideal future state. They mapped the current state to the future state, met more people, and stopped being single-threaded, then closed a much larger deal on a shorter timeline, which she says has happened on several deals.
“We weren't single threaded anymore.”
Carlos said some reps found projects being built, identified the line-of-business owner and explained how MongoDB would help that business get to market faster and realise revenue sooner. Doing this early in the cycle made deals move quickly, whereas dealing only with developers and IT ops took much longer.
“If I do that early in my sales cycle, my sales cycle goes super fast, where if I deal with just the developers and the IT ops people, it's going to take a lot longer.”
McKenna says the trigger is whatever your qualification standard is, whether BANT is confirmed, the buyer says they're moving forward, or the deal is a 75% or 90% commit. Her example is a deal in August that won't close until December. By then she wants the MSA redlined and sign-off from everyone on her side on the terms they won't accept. She keeps asking her leader 'why won't this deal happen?'
“By the time the person comes back from vacation that's going to sign your MSA, whatever that is, you're going to have 95% of the paperwork done.”
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Her example is a buyer who says in August that nothing can happen until a December board presentation, and that outsourced procurement can't be engaged without internal approval. Rather than accept that, she would schedule the procurement meeting for right after the presentation. She says it does no harm, gets you on the buyer's calendar before others rush for it, and gets you on your own legal and procurement team's calendar early too.
“There's absolutely no harm in getting the meeting scheduled. Not only will this help you make sure that you get on their calendar now before everybody else is trying to do it.”
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McKenna says most reps accept 'we can't do anything until the board meeting' and wait. She asks whether the buyer will present and wait for feedback, ask permission to spend, or announce a decision they already have authority to make. She also asks whether they have presented this kind of deal before, what pushback usually comes up, and how she can help them prepare. A first-time presenter who is presenting rather than asking or telling means a different story for the deal than the seller probably assumed.
“Are you going to be presenting, telling, or asking the board for permission? Are they presenting and waiting for feedback? Are they asking for permission to spend money with you? Or are they saying, hey, this is what we're going to do?”
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Nick Cegelski said his 30MPC sponsorship deals usually start with a marketing manager, need VP or CMO approval, and are often lost after the manager takes information to their boss. McKenna argued that budget objections often mean value wasn't proven. She would tell the manager early that buyers often lack allocated budget and you'll need to get creative. She would then ask which channels, such as syndicated content or pay-per-click, have and haven't delivered ROI, and suggest bringing those owners onto the call.
“Well, no shit budget wasn't allocated for this, especially if it's something new that you're selling. But you have to figure out how to partner in multi -thread to pull from different budgets.”
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The speaker said having no budget differs from having access to funds, and that the key question is whether the person with the business problem can access funds for a purchase. They said a budget objection can be reframed by tying the solution to revenue, profitability, risk or time to market.
“Nou, je hebt het gezegd, hebben ze accesse voor funds? Dat is verschillend dan hebben ze budget.”
Using 30MPC sponsorships as her example, McKenna suggests positioning them as a way to attract new talent and asking to speak with HR or the chief people officer. She says the audience is maybe 6% VP, while the BDRs and AEs investing in themselves are the ones listening.
“Can we talk to HR? Can we talk to your chief people officer? What are you guys doing to bring in fresh young minds?”
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Randy says the customer had 14% revenue growth but 17% operating expense growth from consolidations. He says his message to the executive was three slides showing how to bring operating expense growth down to 11% and then to 8%, discussing EBITDA and earnings per share, and never talking about the technology. He says the approach led to a six-year contract with forecasted committed base utilization in minutes and a 20% premium on flex minutes over baseline.
“Revenue growth was 14%. Their operational expense growth was 17%.”
Randy says reps get stuck when they sell operational benefits below the line, such as avoiding thirteen spreadsheets or writing code, and forget to tie them back to the economic buyer's priorities. He says economic buyers care about earnings per share, EBITDA and the three or four corporate initiatives they are tied to. He says reps who do not talk that language get booted out of the room.
“The C-suite doesn't care about operational benefits making other people's lives easier below the line”
John Kaplan says that when he asks anyone inside a selling company what the customer's biggest business issue is, he usually gets a technical answer, and the question has to be reframed repeatedly to reach a business issue. He suggests asking it on every deal and counting how many times it has to be reframed, and thinks it is getting worse partly because of the focus on AI. Sam Costello adds that it has never been easier to solve, since an LLM can identify a company's biggest business problems.
“Ask on every deal that you have. Just start off with what's the biggest business issue.”
Bove's leaders review current-quarter and next-quarter top deals using a spreadsheet of 15 questions, filled in by the rep. The questions cover the close date and why it is that date, the economic buyer and when they last met, the champions, and when a proof of value started and ends, so reps often spot gaps themselves.
“there's a deal review spreadsheet we have that asks 15 questions. It saves time. So a deal review isn't an hour, an hour and a half, but it's actually only 30 minutes.”
Stuart says in a deal review he checks whether the rep has answers to the three Ys, then whether there is a champion, then tests that champion. He recommends reviewing with a peer who is not emotionally invested, since that person can look at the deal without knowing the names. He says his own leadership asked him these same questions, and a champion should be able to answer them to their leadership.
“Why anything? Why now? Why Mongo?”
Sam Costello says in a compliance-style review the rep only tries to prove they already have what the reviewer wants so they can get off the call, while in a hunt the team assumes there is something it does not know and looks for what could go wrong. He says if a rep does not leave a MEDDPIC review excited, something went wrong, since the review should uncover gaps. He adds that if a rep follows a compliance process and still loses, the process loses mindshare.
“If it's a compliance effort, then you're just trying to prove that you already got what that person wants”
McMahon described calling a prospect who had earlier said a problem needed solving by October 31 and reminding him of the implications of that date. He said a five-minute call can become half an hour once the implications are clear, whereas without a stated consequence of not solving the problem the buyer stays with daily issues.
“de laatste keer dat we gesproken hebben, had je me gezegd dat als je deze pain, of deze problemen, in oktober 31”
Randy uses personal examples: he would need to win the lottery to buy a Ferrari, and would need a bad doctor's report to change his health benefits. He says the seller should show the current state, its true negative consequences and the cost of inaction, creating both an emotional and a rational reason to move. He says deals that do not start this way will lack momentum and emotion over time.
“Nobody makes big strategic decisions or starts the process in this zone of, you know, small decisions.”
He said he would recap the reasons the prospect gave for why the tool was better, to have them revalidate those. He would then ask what might stop them from moving forward, and said the aim was to resolve concerns either way. He said most sellers avoid this question because it is scary.
“so what are the reasons why you're not going to move forward?”
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Randy says that when selling software worth around $3 million, the buyer's job is at risk if the purchase goes wrong, so nerves rise late in the cycle even after the buyer has agreed to the business case. He says the seller's job in that final zone is to make sure the buyer does not lose their job for the decision. He describes the confidence built there as what creates the urgency that carries the deal to close.
“I think all deals lost inside the 10 yard line had nothing to do with your capabilities. It has everything to do with their lack of confidence.”
According to Nick, interest-based CTAs such as 'do you want to learn more?' used to be the most effective. The analysis found that an offer of value, such as 'I can send over a couple of ideas or examples,' is much more likely to get the prospect to agree to a meeting or keep the conversation going.
“what we actually learned was that making an offer, an offer of value, actually has a much higher likelihood of getting someone to agree to a meeting and continue the conversation.”
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Roberge says the data shows that the best SDRs and cold callers, on average, handle three or four objections before booking a meeting. He mentions this while describing the objection flywheel.
“And the data shows that the best SDRs and cold callers out there, on average, will handle three or four of those before they book a meeting.”
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Roberge describes an objection flywheel: the rep asks for the meeting, listens to the objection, handles it, and asks again. He says he never lets the prospect out of the loop until they hang up. He credits the simple script with freeing mental energy to listen and respond to objections.
“So I'm in this flywheel, and I'm never gonna let the person out of the flywheel until they hang up.”
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Alex points out that Kade's pitch named specific signals to watch, so a prospect who ignores it might still think they should be checking Discord more. He says this shows the seller will add value in the first meeting and builds trust. Kade says nearly every pitch he sends includes two ideas the prospect could use the product for.
“my whole goal without bound is to make it clear that I'm going to add value in the meeting even if you never talked to me again afterward.”
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said Brad Scott (Revenue Builders), Christopher O'Donnell (The Science of Scaling), Amanda Kahlow (Topline), Matthew Kropp ([Un]Churned), Daniel Simon (Revenue Builders), Ghazi Masood (The Revenue Leadership Podcast) and 4 more
Brad says the freed time lets top reps learn from the best people, study their process and spend time in customers' offices. He says AI makes the best reps much more productive, while average reps can level up by removing manual work like QBR decks and research.
“they have automated their like daily and weekly processes. So their prospecting list, their LinkedIn outreach, their, you know, creation of customer value decks, etc, like all of that happens.”
Christopher says that with AI note-takers the seller can pay full attention, build personal rapport and go deep in discovery. If something is missed it will 'pop up and remind us', and if another channel has already answered a question it doesn't need to be asked again. The seller can focus on what is still unknown about how this prospect could succeed.
“We can get very deep into discovery because we know that if we miss something in discovery, it's gonna pop up and remind us.”
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Amanda Kahlow says her sellers usually go away after a call and take another week to produce a perspective slide, and she says that lost time kills deals. Her superhuman builds the slide and an ROI calculator in the moment, based on what the buyer said about their business and pain points. The aim is to give the human seller the tools to move the deal forward immediately.
“Usually our sellers go away and build that themselves and it takes them another week to get that out and then all like time is lost, time kills all deals.”
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Kropp said any time sales teams spend on preparing for calls, documenting meetings, following up, or preparing quotes is toil. He said humans should manage customer relationships and think about strategy and how to sell, while AI does the rest.
“That's all waste, toil.”
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Daniel said his forecast is due in Salesforce each Thursday before a Friday call. He uses Glean agents to pull recent emails and call recordings and push the next steps into Salesforce, and he said they no longer have to give their manager verbal updates on deals throughout the week.
“you could actually take the call recording Upload it to our Salesforce update agent that we have”
He said the research and information gathering reps used to do is now automated, so salespeople can spend their time with customers rather than back-office work. He pointed to teams he managed in previous roles where people spent more than half their week on Salesforce hygiene and updating Salesforce, and said those days are gone.
“like Salesforce hygiene and people spending more than half their week updating Salesforce.”
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McMahon says the remaining 75 to 80 percent goes to admin, updating the tech stack, researching customers and use cases, and coordinating calendars and information. He believes AI can at least halve that non-selling work, which could lift selling time to 50 to 75 percent. Alex agrees.
“I'm spending 80 % of my time doing that crap that AI can help me at least cut in half, maybe even more.”
Kyle Norton says that to speed up the funnel, his team uses AI to do the research and fill in the information so the rep does not need to research before dialing. The BDR gets exactly what they need, which he describes as two or three things to say rather than 20. He says that from there the team can test different pattern interrupts and value offers.
“make sure that the rep doesn't have to do any research before picking up the phone and calling.”
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Mark defined selling time as the share of a rep's week spent face to face or on Zoom with a customer or prospect. He said this is possible today but not easy. He said that if admin work is removed while skills, demand and product-market fit stay the same, rep productivity could roughly triple.
“what is accessible to unlock massive efficiency improvements in every go to market org is first milestone drive selling time from 25 % to 80%”
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The speaker says many productivity unlocks come from very generic tools doing simple things that used to take a lot of time. The speaker says the massive unlock has come from freeing salespeople from admin so they have more time for what they are good at, and that AI CRM or modules from HubSpot or Salesforce could be a later form of this.
“the massive unlock has come from simple things being done for these people to give them more time to do what they're really good at”
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Dmitri said using Perplexity before a meeting to research the company and the person can save a lot of prep time. He said many of the discovery questions a rep would ask in the meeting can be answered ahead of time, with maybe 80% of the answer available in advance.
“you can actually get maybe 80 % of the answer ahead of time.”
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said John Gilbo (Impact Pricing), John McMahon (Revenue Builders), Keenan (Topline), Rick Smolen (Topline), Randy Riemersma (Revenue Builders), Stuart Gwynn (Revenue Builders) and 4 more
He first asks whether the retailer sells mainly through everyday pricing (a Walmart-esque model with infrequent promos) or high-low promotion like some grocers, whether it has seasonality and one-time buys, and whether it relies on markdowns. He says markdowns can be a huge drag on margin and a lot of work to manage. He describes his role as coming in to solve problems rather than sell.
“I just try to understand how they go to market to their end consumer from a pricing perspective. And then I just try to come, I truthfully just come to be a problem solver”
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McMahon said that if a seller moves too fast through discovery, the customer may grasp what the product does and then withhold the metrics needed for a compelling ROI or value proposition. He said the buyer does this because they know what the seller is doing to them, which makes it harder to justify price and the purchase later.
“I've seen it where the customers now unwilling to give you the metrics required for you to create a compelling ROI or value proposition because they know what you're doing to them.”
He said that in his operating system the question is whether the rep got a defined problem, starting from the organisation's root causes. The definition covers how many root causes there are, how often each occurs, the downstream impact and whose impact it is, internal or external. He said the aim is to see the problem defined in the buyer's terms.
“we're looking for, did you get a defined problem?”
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He called this sales physics and said nobody buys anything unless that condition holds. He argued that teams over-invest in training the behaviour of selling and under-invest in understanding what the customer experiences and what would drive them to switch. He said a good system helps the buyer recognise that state, which allows the deal to close.
“nobody buys anything unless their current state is untenable and intolerable.”
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Rick contrasts the past, when product expertise won because information was scarce and product knowledge had to be installed and taught by the vendor, with today, when information is everywhere and switching costs are low. He says sellers now need industry expertise, knowledge of where CFOs will spend, and alignment to customer outcomes. He says the methodology used by leaders such as John McMahon is about creating customer value by uncovering problems worth solving.
“the winner is in somebody that can actually diagnose the problem better than the actual buyer can do it themselves.”
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Randy says false velocity is one of the things that screws deals most, because a seller who does not slow down early cannot keep the deal out of danger later. He says reps should discover the customer's pain or problem that they can then solve, rather than throwing product features at the buyer. He sums this up as slowing down to speed up.
“I think one of the things that screws deals immensely is false velocity at the front end.”
Stuart says good reps sit in discovery and ask follow-up questions to understand implication, such as what happens if you do nothing or if the outcome is achieved. He coaches inside reps to follow the money and ask how a change would make or save the customer money, a method he used while covering a large bank at MongoDB.
“the biggest two words I like to say is, so what?”
Stuart says a rep has to do this work in discovery to have an educated opinion that an executive will listen to and partner on. He describes listening with intellectual curiosity and in a personal way, rather than treating discovery as filling out the capture sheet MongoDB uses.
“I think the most important stage in you know, sales process is discovery.”
Kaplan describes what he and his team call seller deficit disorder. It is based on buyer surveys where the first complaint is that the seller does not understand my business and the second is that the seller does not listen. He says these complaints have been the core ones for thousands of years, and that sellers pitch from an inside-out view rather than trying to understand the buyer first.
“when they survey buyers, the first thing they come back and say, you don't understand my business.”
Usha says HiveBright used to use the SPICE framework, which put reps into a mindset of asking budget questions on the first call. She says this is not necessary in her view, because budget will come up quickly anyway. She recommends finding the pain point, the problem to solve and the impact it can create before moving into the commercial process.
“it's not necessary in my mind. You will get to it anyway very quickly.”
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Usha uses an event example to show how a product mindset digs deeper: asking what kind of event it is, how long it runs, how many attendees it has and how the agenda is typically structured. She says the goal is to find where the most value is created and solve for that. She lists this alongside, but separately from, thinking from first principles and not applying patterns or frameworks right away.
“don't leave it at a superficial level, try and ask deeper questions to really understand where is the most value getting created”
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Michelle said customers will tell you how to sell to them if you ask the right questions. Her sequence is to understand the pain, then present phase one, phase two and phase three, the sales process, implementation, the long-term picture and what it will cost.
“Here's phase one, phase two, phase three. Here's what it looks like through the sales process.”
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Mark says the instinctive first slide is about the company, its years in business, customer count and funding raised, and that this is wrong. He says the first slide should recap what you have learned, for example that the customer is losing market share because demand generation has fallen apart, and then ask whether you have it right. He hopes even the CEO disagrees, because that opens a conversation that is hard to have in a group meeting.
“the first slide is a recap of what you know about their situation”
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Ron Gabrisko says early on at Databricks his selling was less about the pitch and more about discovery and asking questions. He says messaging was too technical, so it had to help customers understand how to use the product rather than starting from a blank sheet. He describes a common belief among technical founders that the best product at the lowest price will win the whole market, and says that belief is wrong.
“sales people need to teach your customers how to use it and how to get value out of it.”
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Mark Bersh says that when a founder moves to selling and thinks it needs a sales process, they usually build a deck covering what was built, the features and benefits, and the problems solved. He calls this an inside-out approach and argues it goes against sales research. He recommends an outside-in process that focuses on how the buyer sees the world before they know the product exists.
“It's what I call an inside out approach.”
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Sangeeta describes the enterprise method: uncover the pain more deeply than the customer first says, paint a positive vision with the implications of not acting, and show what the product needs to succeed. The result is a business case for the executive buyer, a timeline worked backwards from the outcomes, and metrics that show success. She calls it a tried and tested sales methodology.
“So the net result is you're painting a vision, you're helping the customer understand the exact characteristics of how this process would look like, you also help them understand the metrics that will show success.”
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Andrew said a salesperson cannot simply sell to developers and must first show they can help and have empathy for the problems. Once the seller understands the user journey and the pain in the buyer's environment, they can understand the impact they could have. He described this as qualification led by technical understanding rather than by sales process.
“once you understand that user journey, you can understand the pain that they're in, in their environment, their situation, ultimately the impact you could have”
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Mark role-played a rep who accepted that a prospect needed to be SOC 2 compliant next week and was the decision maker. Stevie, as the manager, asked why it was urgent and whether the rep knew why. Mark praised this, said you keep going because the why often will not be there at first, and compared it to a two-year-old asking why until the answer reaches a business reason.
“They're like, okay, why do they want to buy? Well, they're trying to get SOC 2 compliant. Okay, why do they want SOC 2 compliance?”
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said John Gilbo (Impact Pricing), Anne Gary (Revenue Builders), Sam Costello (Revenue Builders), Michelle Bove (Revenue Builders), Daniel Simon (Revenue Builders), John Kaplan (Revenue Builders) and 3 more
He calls this a '360 approach' to reaching both blockers and advocates. He lists the IT team, the CFO group (for ROI), business teams and merchants. He notes you can't always get access and that salespeople sometimes simply forget.
“You want to hit the IT teams, the CFO group to talk about, you know, the ROI, the business teams, the merchants. You want to cover off on all of that. And it's one, you can't always get access, but two, you forget like you're human.”
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Gary said a seller should not stop after finding one champion but should find many champions throughout the process, because winning the collective yes in today's larger, more political organizations requires it. Another speaker then added that technical software deals can involve technical and political champions, and that a political champion may not be able to tell the financial metrics story.
“je vindt veel champions door de proces ook”
The speaker said that if you are single-threaded on one person you are at risk, and that while sellers could once be more single-threaded with an economic buyer, they had not seen single-threaded deals in years.
“single -threaded, je bent op het risico”
Sam Costello says Harness sells a technical platform of 14 products, so it usually has to win two to three champions per deal. These are a platform team that built the tooling, a developer or engineering team consuming it, and a security team with standards and governance it wants followed. He says that without technical mindshare in each of those places, the deal will get stuck.
“we must go win usually two to three champions to do a deal”
Bove says the team realised they were missing executive champions and had not understood the customer's why or ideal future state. They mapped the current state to the future state, met more people, and stopped being single-threaded, then closed a much larger deal on a shorter timeline, which she says has happened on several deals.
“We weren't single threaded anymore.”
At Lacework Daniel sold to security owners, IT, DevOps and cloud ops, and development leaders, because each group had a different role in the decision. He said the more he built a ground swell across these groups, the more business value he could support for a higher deal size, and the faster the deal moved.
“moves my deal. much faster than just going single-threaded into the account.”
Kaplan said multi-threading is non-negotiable today and that a seller who has one champion in an account will be in jeopardy. He framed this as a reason to keep the principles of qualification active rather than treating them as a checkbox.
“If you're not multi-threading, you're going to be in jeopardy.”
Alex says that after the technical team wins the math, the business win still has to be built with infrastructure owners, product leaders, engineering and other technical experts, each of whom can win logic battles. He says the AE must listen, find where the value is and command a premium for the fastest tokens.
“But the AE has got to be an extreme orchestrator.”
Carlos said some reps found projects being built, identified the line-of-business owner and explained how MongoDB would help that business get to market faster and realise revenue sooner. Doing this early in the cycle made deals move quickly, whereas dealing only with developers and IT ops took much longer.
“If I do that early in my sales cycle, my sales cycle goes super fast, where if I deal with just the developers and the IT ops people, it's going to take a lot longer.”
Writer originally sold mainly to line-of-business buyers such as marketing and UX teams. As demand for AI surged, CIOs and heads of AI became more prevalent sponsors because they had to get their arms around all the tooling options. Andy Shorkey says Writer evolved its playbook to engage CIOs, heads of AI and other technical stakeholders directly, while continuing to drive outcomes for the line of business, which could be the CRO, CFO or CMO.
“ultimately in our world, we have two executive sponsors.”
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Donald Kelly said the Formlabs rep was not getting everyone engaged in dental sales. He needed to get past gatekeepers to office managers, get doctors engaged, engage people working directly with patients, and do so early in the process. Mark added that each member of the decision-making unit cares about different things, for example the doctor about patient care and the CFO about price.
“The doctor cares about like, I'm going to get patient care up. I need to do my job easily.”
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He gave this figure, hedged with 'I think', while describing a manager who notices across a rep's whole pipeline that the rep does not multi-thread well, and then uses the one-on-one to focus on that theme.
“we know from Gong that that affects win rates by 23%”
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said Kayde Givens (30 Minutes to President's Club), Garrett Marker ([Un]Churned), Randy Riemersma (Revenue Builders), Kevin Mandia (Grit), Mark Roberge (The Science of Scaling)
She works with reps to find later-stage prospects facing problems similar to the customers on the panel. She preps panelists beforehand and pairs a CS leader or strong CSM with a rep as moderators, and always opens up Q&A. She asks panelists not to sugarcoat, for example saying if the sales process was too long or procurement was never discussed, so the team learns how the experience could have been better. Customers and prospects have stayed for closing night parties.
“pro tip, put customers No matter what happens, that prospect always gets old. I've never had a situation where you put a prospect on stage and they're like, eh”
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He explained that people who have reached a late stage of evaluation often want to talk to unbiased references, even though those references may be paid or may be investors. He said the underlying purpose is to reduce anxiety about whether what they have been told is accurate. He presented this as a buyer pattern he experiences himself.
“they know that you do that because you're paid to do that”
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Randy says that in the final zone the champion is going to be getting nervous, so the seller has to be texting them daily and hold their hand. He lists customer referrals, executive alignment and execution excellence on the seller's side as the things that must go very well. He says the buyer has already decided about the product and agreed to the business case by this point, so the work is about the buyer's confidence.
“We have to be texting with our champion on a daily basis at this zone because they are going to be getting nervous.”
Mandia calls this the dirty secret of enterprise sales, especially in security. He says winning large brands such as JP Morgan, Exxon, Walmart and Target leads others to want the same product. He says he saw this effect at FireEye and that it applies to companies like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks.
“Everybody buys what everybody else bought.”
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Even while closing hundreds of customers a quarter, Roberge called the few who switched from a competitor, asked why they switched, gave them his cell phone and offered dinner or coffee when in their city. In return he asked that, about once a month, they speak with a prospect weighing that competitor, and he trained reps to offer prospects a call with a customer who had used both. He says he believes he learned this from Salesforce.
“If we have a customer that's considering competitor A and us, I want my salespeople to be trained to say, hey, would you like to talk to a customer that's used both?”
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said Mark Roberge (The Science of Scaling), Randy Riemersma (Revenue Builders), Jason Forget (Revenue Builders), Jeremey Donovan (The Revenue Leadership Podcast), Frederic Kerrest (The Science of Scaling)
BANT covers budget, authority, need and timing. MEDDIC covers metrics, economic buyer, decision process, decision-making unit, identify pain and champion. Mark says enterprise needs a more consultative seller who understands champions and internal politics.
“In SMB, we often use BANT, which is budget, authority, need, timing, because it's one person. In enterprise, we often use MEDDIC.”
Randy describes a deal inspection process he calls MEDDIC, and says he asks reps early on to explain the identified business pain, the champion and the economic buyer. He says the pain should matter and ideally tie back to a corporate objective, and the economic buyer should have discretionary use of funds. He says if the problem sponsor is weak, the rest of the deal slows down.
“If we don't have a strong problem sponsor, then the rest of the deal is also going to get slowed down or, you know, lacks the momentum, the energy behind that we want.”
Jason said that as a company grows and adds sales managers, each one must vet deals the same way. Otherwise leaders cannot know the quality of the pipeline, such as who the economic buyer is or whether the champion will act. He said consistent qualification improves intel on win rate and loss rate, which then lets the company train, enable and hire managers.
“if every deal is vetted differently, then I don't actually know the quality of my pipeline and therefore I don't know how predictable I really am”
He said that in the survey, the most common sales qualification and deal inspection framework is MEDDIC, MEDPIC or a variation, especially in upper mid-market to enterprise sales. He said his first steps would be rigorous MEDDIC deal inspection, then disciplined pipeline generation with time carved out, then checking that the company is going after the ICP it thinks it is.
“if I could do one thing, it would be incredibly disciplined, weekly. deal reviews.”
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Roberge lists options: BANT (budget, authority, need, timing), which he has most people start with, especially outside enterprise; MEDDIC for complex enterprise deals; Winning by Design's SPICED (situation, pain, impact, critical event, decision); and GPCT (goal, plan, challenge, timeline), which HubSpot used and which he calls great for discovery. You can then add or remove a letter to fit your business, as Okta did with MEDDPIC.
“Other popular ones, BANT, budget, authority, need timing. Super simple. I like to have most people start there, especially if you're not doing enterprise sales.”
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Kerrest's qualification questions include: who is buying and why, what their process is, whether you are replacing something or opening a greenfield category (evangelical sell versus a 10x better mousetrap), who your coach is versus your champion, and who is trying to block you when you're not in the room. He says any innovative product is guaranteed to upset someone's apple cart.
“And by the way, who's trying to jam you when you're not there? You're guaranteed whatever super innovative product you're bringing to market is going to upset someone's apple cart.”
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Kerrest says he has heard this from technical founder-CEOs multiple times this week already. He argues sales methodologies refined over the past 20 years are very useful to today's technical founders and advocates something simple like MEDDIC.
“I have a deck that explains what my product does. That's my sales process.”
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Paul says the pre-sales team was working deals without a method for finding who the decision makers were or what their criteria were, so when a deal came in it was a guessing game. He says there was never a science to it, which he saw as a gap in the sales process.
“There was never a sort of a science to it.”
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said Samantha McKenna (30 Minutes to President's Club), Garrett Marker ([Un]Churned), Amanda Kahlow (Topline), Bob Kocis (Revenue Builders)
For a champion recommending a purchase, McKenna's example being a multi-year deal worth $5 million over three years, she asks the same question a leader should ask the rep. She wants to know which objections or pushback they expect, and whether others have relationships with particular software firms. She would also ask about the procurement process at that spend level.
“Why do you think that won't get done? Any objections that you can anticipate, any pushback you can anticipate? Are there relationships maybe that others have with particular software firms that we need to think about?”
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McKenna says reps avoid uncomfortable questions so they don't upset anyone, when they should treat the buyer as a partner who wants the solution as much as the seller wants the revenue. If a buyer hesitates to share details, she reads it as a sign they probably aren't sure yours is the solution they'll pick. She says this is common in calls where the rep has pushed a solution that wasn't properly vetted, then hears a presentation date and commits the deal with 'happy ears.' Her fix is deeper discovery into the real business pain and building rapport to earn the right to ask.
“It may also be a sign that one, you don't feel like this deal has as many legs as it does, or two, that you haven't built the relationship enough with this buyer”
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He said he would recap the reasons the prospect gave for why the tool was better, to have them revalidate those. He would then ask what might stop them from moving forward, and said the aim was to resolve concerns either way. He said most sellers avoid this question because it is scary.
“so what are the reasons why you're not going to move forward?”
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She says sellers are terrible at asking whether the buyer has budget, is the authority, and can get this done. She ties this to the human relationship, which makes sellers reluctant to push on these questions.
“Are you the authority? Can we get this done? They're terrible at that.”
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Bob Kocis described his brutal honesty framework, drawing on a question a former PTC executive asked him: does the customer know they are actually buying? He said he challenges reps on why the customer is buying anything at all, and that the customer's answer is incredibly powerful. He said that on recent sales calls he has asked executives this question and seen reps cringe, because they had not asked it and did not know the answer.
“sometimes just asking the customer, Mr. Customer, why are you buying anything at all?”
said Samantha McKenna (30 Minutes to President's Club), Daniel Simon (Revenue Builders), Chris Vik (Revenue Builders), Carlos Delatorre (Revenue Builders)
Asked whether to delay reaching power until a champion is bought in, she said she'd start with power. Under her 'Show Me You Know Me' approach, rather than writing to 400 marketing managers, you research and go to the CMO. If the CMO refers you to a subordinate who then blocks you or doesn't respond, you can go back to the CMO and keep them updated, since they made the introduction. She added that it depends on the buyer and that the faster you multithread and reach power the better, and that even short of power you should double the number of people you are talking to.
“I would always start with power if you can.”
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For a champion with no political clout who keeps saying 'I don't know', McKenna acknowledges that the questions have probably frustrated them, then asks whether their boss or another leader, such as the SDR leader, would know better. She proposes a follow-up where she brings her own CS leader and they bring those people. She says the response tells you whether you're dealing with a gatekeeper or someone who can bring in other contacts, and that staying with only that person wastes your time.
“Armand, I probably filled your head with all these questions and you're probably frustrated with how often you're saying, I don't know. Do you think Nick would have a better sense of these these answers?”
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McKenna's example has Armand as the champion and Nick as the decision maker. Rather than asking what Nick will care about, she asks Armand about this year's priorities, forecast, growth, roadmap and plan. She expects Armand to say Nick is better placed to answer and offer to bring him in. The show notes list this as a main takeaway: ask questions the champion may not know so they involve higher-ups.
“Start asking questions that Armand can't answer instead of being like, what's Nick gonna care about?”
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Daniel said executives are being pushed to roll out AI, so he starts with an enterprise-wide message and asks for buy-in to be introduced to other personas. He said his biggest deals came this way, while landing low can solve one problem without reaching other teams. If he lands low, he asks the champion for introductions.
“I'm always trying to get as high as I can and then work down the chain.”
Chris Vik said his team found it very hard to reach the economic buyer in the last two or three years. They worked to get to the economic buyer early by solving a problem the C-level had not cared about and turning it into a C-level problem. They ran the advisory piece for free only with accounts that had pain and executive buy-in, because the team was small.
“solving a problem that the C-level has never really cared about, and make it a C-level problem”
Early in his career at Beckman Coulter, Carlos spent three days calling a doctor's office manager until he got a meeting with the doctor, who was about to take a competitor's machine. After she agreed to see him, he won the deal, then put it through a competing distributor and told the distributor that had sold the rival product he would keep doing this until they talked, after which that distributor became his best.
“then you should stop at nothing and go as high as you need to go and be as persistent as you need to be to get your message to the person who makes the decision.”
Mark says there is no incentive for a salesperson to call the frontline user. Instead, they pitch the economic buyer on an issue such as 5,000 people using the product without it being secure or integrated. He says discovery is then needed to see whether that is a real pain point for the buyer.
“They're really calling the economic buyer and pitching that.”
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said John Gilbo (Impact Pricing), Manny Medina (Topline), Jen Igartua (Topline), Stuart Gwynn (Revenue Builders), Andy Shorkey (The Science of Scaling)
If he doesn't think QuickLizard can help, he may take one more meeting and then tell the prospect directly. His disqualifiers are low complexity, selling only a few SKUs, insufficient revenue, or not having the team in place. He frames this as being open, honest and not pushy.
“either they're not complex enough or sometimes they only sell a few SKUs or their revenues not enough. They don't have the team in place. I'll just be honest with them that there's a gap for what I think the cost versus the value would return.”
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Most of Paid's demand is inbound from companies struggling to price agents. If the problem isn't owned by the CEO, Paid punts; if it is, Manny gets on the call with the CEO. He says these conversations are usually triggered by board discussions. He doesn't try to predict which customers will win.
“So our question is more like, you know, is this a CEO problem or not? If it's not a CEO problem, we punt.”
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She defines product-market fit as a fast-growing sales team in which all the reps are getting fed. Below 20 reps, or not about to reach 20, she doubts the company needs Go Nimbly at her price point, which she gave as 20 grand plus. She turns down business when there is no strong operator or executive commitment, because transformational work needs a leader with goodwill and executive presence to open doors.
“if you don't have 20 reps or about to get to 20 reps, I'm going like, I don't know if you need us. Like, I'm charging 20 grand plus”
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Stuart says he tells his team to qualify out as quickly as they qualify in and spend time attaching to big problems. He names prospects who only want proofs of concept, prospects with a competitor's champion in the room, and problems that are simply not important enough.
“let's qualify out Just as quickly as we qualify in and let's spend our time to attach to big problems.”
Stuart says that when a rep is desperate for a deal they will attach to everything and move too quickly, while enough pipeline and experience give the courage to say no. At his company his team qualifies out almost as much as it qualifies in, because time is the most valuable asset.
“we're qualifying out almost as much as we're qualifying in.”
Andy Shorkey says Writer deliberately gravitates toward mission-critical workloads rather than the long tail of smaller use cases in customers' backlogs, though he notes that 'river of nickels' does add up. Writer helps customers frame the business case at the start and keeps defending the value delivered over time. He credits this focus on value and customer success for customers promoting Writer to others.
“We go after Mission Critical workloads and use cases. And we are not selling a lick of software unless we are defending the ROI and the value.”
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Rosenthal said that when reps brought in customers willing to sign for 250K or 500K, she required them to show the forecast model and map how the customer would reach that figure. If the answer was that the use cases were not yet defined, she said the company was not ready to move forward with that customer. She described this as the current process at OpenAI, after the ChatGPT surge.
“I make them show me the forecast model. How are we going to get to that 100K? And let's map it out so I know it's real. And if the answer is, well, we don't know yet, we don't really have our use cases defined. Then I say, okay, we're not ready and we're not ready to move forward with this customer.”
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said Alex Murphy (30 Minutes to President's Club), Kade Hinkle (30 Minutes to President's Club), Nick Cegelski (30 Minutes to President's Club), Matt Allison (Topline), Mark Roberge (The Science of Scaling)
Alex points out that Kade's pitch named specific signals to watch, so a prospect who ignores it might still think they should be checking Discord more. He says this shows the seller will add value in the first meeting and builds trust. Kade says nearly every pitch he sends includes two ideas the prospect could use the product for.
“my whole goal without bound is to make it clear that I'm going to add value in the meeting even if you never talked to me again afterward.”
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Kade keeps videos human and limits himself to two or three takes, opening with 'hey [name], nice connecting' even though people dislike that line. For companies selling to technical buyers, his current focus, he suggests surfacing conversations on GitHub, Reddit, Discord and Slack. He gives two example signals: specific titles complaining about competitors, and new job changers asking their community which tools to adopt in their first 90 days. He closes with 'worst case we can share how this team booked like 75% more pipeline after one quarter using the strategy.'
“Worst case we can share how this team booked like 75 % more pipeline after one quarter using the strategy.”
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Alex sells 30MPC's team training program. In an example of how such a video would sound, he cites specifics such as hiring 12 new reps, adding four last quarter, and a fundraise last year, then hypothesizes the problem: high growth targets alongside onboarding and ramp time. He describes the program in one sentence and closes by saying that, worst case, he can share some free material that might be useful in the short term.
“The video is sort of the first 90 seconds of what a good cold call would sound like, but I don't have any responses from the person.”
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According to Nick, interest-based CTAs such as 'do you want to learn more?' used to be the most effective. The analysis found that an offer of value, such as 'I can send over a couple of ideas or examples,' is much more likely to get the prospect to agree to a meeting or keep the conversation going.
“what we actually learned was that making an offer, an offer of value, actually has a much higher likelihood of getting someone to agree to a meeting and continue the conversation.”
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Matt said TrendKite started with cold call selling and later added an inbound motion. For Handraise he expects much more focused, high-quality outreach that uses screenshots of the product to send real value, rather than throwing everything into an AI machine on day one. He said the company is still learning what will work well.
“And I think for us, it's going to just be like much more of a highly focused, high quality outreach where we're using screenshots of the product and trying to send real value versus anything that we're just, at least on day one, throwing into an AI machine to call it spam in the tam.”
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Mark recounts a friend at Salesforce whose territory was two companies, one of them a Target-like retailer (Mark says it wasn't actually Target). It was an Oracle shop the friend had to convert to Salesforce. Instead of calling for two months, the rep shopped there, used the app and loyalty card, and kept screenshots of the emails the company sent to see what it remembered. He built a 30-page diagnosis of its marketing strategy, printed 25 copies, mailed one to every digital marketing executive, and within three days sat down with all of them.
“And he mailed it, he printed out 25 copies and mailed it to every single digital market executive at Target.”
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Roberge describes a friend at a large MarTech company who was given two large public accounts that were not customers. Over two months the friend shopped at a store, took screenshots, used the app and then built a 50-page research paper on the weaknesses and opportunities. He printed and bound 25 copies and sent one to each of the top 25 digital marketing executives, and got a meeting in three days and a contract in two months.
“he printed it out and binded it and sent 25 copies to the company, one to each of the top 25 digital marketing executives at the company.”
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said Dan Lee (The Science of Scaling), Samantha McKenna (30 Minutes to President's Club), Stuart Gwynn (Revenue Builders)
Dan Lee said selling to an account is a complex human game of chess. First you map the board: the situation, the stakeholders, their problems and priorities, how they influence each other, and who decides versus who only influences. Then you choose a strategy, such as top-down or bottom-up, and plan a few moves ahead, such as whether an email leads to an event, a demo or a white paper.
“where first you need to understand the board.”
McKenna calls this 'who are the theys' and applies it to both reps and leaders. When a buyer says 'we'll take it back to the team and they'll decide', she asks who is on the committee, to find past clients or mutual connections with her executive team. When 'they' means competitors submitting proposals, she says you must find out who they are. Her illustration is a $250,000 car whose competition turns out to be a Prius or a 1989 Honda.
“Every single time you hear the word they, from your rep or from your buyer, you want you to ask yourself, do you know who is in that they?”
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Responding to a host's example of selling accounting software to a law firm whose CFO or COO presents options at a quarterly partners' meeting, she would mention past work with firms like K&L Gates or Skadden and the questions their executive committees asked. She would also ask whether the purchase is within the champion's authority or needs a majority vote at that spend level. She would ask which objections came up when they presented software before, and whether there are one or two persnickety partners she can help them get ready for. The aim, she says, is to make the champion 'look like a star.'
“the last time I worked with K and L Gates, the last time I worked with Skadden, right? One of the things that came up was partners always seemed to ask this.”
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McKenna says most reps accept 'we can't do anything until the board meeting' and wait. She asks whether the buyer will present and wait for feedback, ask permission to spend, or announce a decision they already have authority to make. She also asks whether they have presented this kind of deal before, what pushback usually comes up, and how she can help them prepare. A first-time presenter who is presenting rather than asking or telling means a different story for the deal than the seller probably assumed.
“Are you going to be presenting, telling, or asking the board for permission? Are they presenting and waiting for feedback? Are they asking for permission to spend money with you? Or are they saying, hey, this is what we're going to do?”
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Stuart says mid-market accounts often have one executive buyer who signs off, so reaching that person is enough. Enterprise accounts have different buyers for each initiative, and he calls this org chart selling. He says each line of business is much bigger than a mid-market account, so a technical win alone does not carry the deal.
“There's different EBs for different types of transactions, for different initiatives”
said Mark Stiving (Impact Pricing), John Gilbo (Impact Pricing), Bob Kocis (Revenue Builders)
At a semiconductor company, Stiving pitched a new pricing system as returning 5% of revenue as pure profit and could not convince the CEO. Years later, in a similar situation, he went to every person who cared about pricing, found their specific problems, and quantified what each was costing. Leadership then readily agreed to buy. He frames it as making value believable through specific problems, in line with his view that value is the result of solving problems.
“I went around to every person that cared and figured out what their problems were with pricing. And I was able to quantify, hey, this is costing us this much and this one's costing us this much. And I went in with specific problems back to the leadership team and they're like, oh yeah, we got to get this.”
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He doesn't quantify returns on the first call. Later he shows what consultants say pricing can deliver (the high end), bands of what QuickLizard has achieved historically, and break-even numbers so the prospect sees the hurdle, then discusses the gaps between them. He avoids opening with the 25X figure because it can come across as salesy, comparing it to starting with a 5K rather than an Ironman.
“I like to give them in bands of what we've done historically. I like to give them break even numbers so they can see, look, here's what you've got a hurdle. And then I like to have a nice dialogue about the deltas there.”
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Bob Kocis said the strongest deals had a unique value proposition that the customer helped build and therefore owns, which he said makes deals ironclad. He warned that an ROI calculator nobody owns is not enough, and that if quantifying questions come too late, the customer has already built their own justification. He said the work has to be done up front.
“it has to be owned by you and the company that's buying from you and your champion, right?”
said Rick Smolen (Topline), Joubin Mirzadegan (Grit), Michelle Donnelly (The Revenue Leadership Podcast)
Rick says ShipHero built a tool it calls Sales Hub, which lets the team personalize demos much faster and fit each prospect's flow. He argues a demo tool like this does not need the rigor of the core product because it is customer-facing but not used by customers, and the audience is a captive one that understands the workarounds. He calls it one of the best achievements he has seen the team deliver.
“we've like vibe coded the demo and something we call Sales Hub.”
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Prospects of his company Roadrunner want demos built on their own messy SKUs, and setting up each environment took his head of solutions architecture a couple of days of 'hand-to-hand combat.' He asked what it would take to cut that to a couple of hours, and suggested embedding the needed engineering skills into Claude to try to automate it, while acknowledging it might fail. His framing: with 15 customers at once the manual process breaks, so the choice is hiring ten more people or automating and hiring three.
“either we go hire another ten people or we figure out how to automate this process and we can hire three.”
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Michelle said her team replaces demos with show-me solutions. For a gaming prospect that needed something live for the Super Bowl, the head of product built an AI expert agent from the prospect's publicly available knowledge base and showed it working within less than 24 hours. The team then showed the deployment plan, including who would deploy it, with ticketing integration under 30 days and a website launch in about three days.
“Within less than 24 hours, we could show them how them how it worked for them.”
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Mike said his team often asked prospects in demos for the hardest search they were trying to run, then ran it live in Recruiter. In one case a prospect searching for a popcorn scientist found about eight matching people in the network, and his jaw hit the table and he became a customer right then.
“we'd say, hey, give me the hardest search that you're looking for now.”
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said Anne Gary (Revenue Builders), Sam Costello (Revenue Builders), Stuart Gwynn (Revenue Builders), Michelle Donnelly (The Revenue Leadership Podcast)
Gary said that because sellers work in their industry and call on many companies, they know a lot about what is happening and can share that insight and trend education, which makes the buyer better informed about what is going on outside their own company. She said buyers who see that value are more willing to go somewhere with the seller.
“it's about providing that insight education trend so they actually are more educated”
Sam Costello describes a give-get dynamic in which champions are out in the market trying to learn the best way to solve their problem. Giving them education and awareness early builds some measure of trust, after which the team can start getting the information it needs to understand whether there is something to solve.
“champion deposits are usually education and awareness”
Stuart says a rep cannot ask thirty questions in a row in discovery without the client shutting down, so trust is built through give and take. He describes acknowledging active listening, tying back to something sold before, and sharing a similar challenge and the outcome another organization achieved, then asking if it sounds relevant.
“you can't go into any discovery meeting as we call it and ask 30 questions in a row. At some point, the client's going to shut down.”
Stuart says the vendor often knows more about the customer's technology stack and what peer groups in the same organization use than the customer does. He gives an example of saying we have worked with your org and seen this challenge in a neighboring line of business, then asking whether that sounds relevant. He says customers see the answer as credible information they probably want to know.
“So a lot of times the internal proof points is powerful as the external proof point.”
Michelle said these operational folks say we have been in your shoes, here is what to look for and what to watch out for, even if you do not use us. She said because Crescendo works with many BPO customers every day, the company learns what is and is not working, including how some customers use competitors.
“We bring in operational folks who are not there to sell.”
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said Kyle Norton (The Revenue Leadership Podcast), Justin Shriber (Topline), Jason Forget (Revenue Builders)
In a high-velocity SMB environment, he found off-the-shelf options either too pushy or too enterprise, such as Command of the Message. His team combined elements of methodologies he liked with specific lines and approaches that worked in the field, and trained using call clips of top reps. It took heavy time from the AE, BDR and enablement leaders, managers and reps. He said adoption came because the playbook was built from the reps outward rather than imposed.
“And it wasn't because they were executing the playbook. It was because the playbook was like built on them.”
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He described the first use case Terret tends to start with: a leader who wants to know why deals are lost and what closers do differently. The goal is to capture that approach as a playbook and then make sure the rest of the team adopts it.
“I want to know what my closers are doing differently. I want a playbook that actually bottles up that secret sauce.”
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Jason said that in the early 2000s he came to believe selling is an art form for the top handful of sellers but a science for everyone else. He said his finance and process background led him to turn the art into a system that leaders and reps can use. He credited the approach with his move into RevOps and then sales leadership.
“as much as it's selling as an art form for the top five or 10 % of sellers, it truly is a science for the rest.”
Jonathan said that if playbooks were that simple, any company could be taken to a billion-dollar company easily. He said every product and every demo is different, so a leader should not arrive with a ready-made playbook.
“Every company is different. So if the playbook was that simple, you could take any company to a billion dollar company.”
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said Nick Cegelski (30 Minutes to President's Club), Samantha McKenna (30 Minutes to President's Club), Jordan Crawford (Topline)
The host starts parallel processing once they feel they and the buyer are 'selling on the same side of the table', and said that can come later than ideal. Earlier moves include getting an NDA signed early and setting up a trial portal or demo instance, which often starts a light security and IT review. The host said that once you can close in four months, the next task is closing in two, and that is how the best sellers make club.
“If you're good at closing a deal in four months, your next task is not to just figure out how to close all those deals and close more of those deals. It's figuring out how to close your four month deals in two months.”
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In his recap, Nick Cegelski gave the example of next steps with customer success, the technical team and the law firm's attorneys. If they aren't dependent on each other, he says to book them all now. He says this builds momentum and moves the deal faster.
“You do not need to just have one next step on the book if the next next steps are not contingent upon that next step.”
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McKenna says the trigger is whatever your qualification standard is, whether BANT is confirmed, the buyer says they're moving forward, or the deal is a 75% or 90% commit. Her example is a deal in August that won't close until December. By then she wants the MSA redlined and sign-off from everyone on her side on the terms they won't accept. She keeps asking her leader 'why won't this deal happen?'
“By the time the person comes back from vacation that's going to sign your MSA, whatever that is, you're going to have 95% of the paperwork done.”
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She says some sellers assume they won't face heavy procurement, depending on company size and deal price. For multi-billion-dollar or Fortune 500 companies, she says the opposite is often true, with many sign-offs from people who take time off at different times. She tells sellers to ask about the procurement process as early as they can.
“Oftentimes, it's the opposite of what you'd expect. Procurement's tougher, spend thresholds are lower, right? And you need 16 different stamps from 14 people who are all going to be on PTO at varying times to get your deals done.”
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McKenna suggests asking what the buyer never agrees to, such as payment terms (net 45, 60 or 90) and where litigation must happen (Delaware, Texas, California). She expects that whatever the buyer wants, your side will not fully accept it, and that legal, procurement, RevOps and sales ops will each need to weigh in. Doing that work early means the documentation is ready well before it is needed.
“ask for a standard MSA. You've done this before, buyer, presumably, right? So what are non -negotiables? What do you guys never agree to? Do you have net 45 terms, net 60, net 90?”
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Her example is a buyer who says in August that nothing can happen until a December board presentation, and that outsourced procurement can't be engaged without internal approval. Rather than accept that, she would schedule the procurement meeting for right after the presentation. She says it does no harm, gets you on the buyer's calendar before others rush for it, and gets you on your own legal and procurement team's calendar early too.
“There's absolutely no harm in getting the meeting scheduled. Not only will this help you make sure that you get on their calendar now before everybody else is trying to do it.”
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Jordan says a team can take all its contracts, identify the deal terms large companies will not accept in contract review, and list the terms they are likely to ask for. He adds that the team can identify which legal reviews are acceptable from historical contracts and define the fastest-closing complex deal and what happens in its final stage.
“If you find that there are certain deal terms that large companies won't accept in contract review, you can take all of your contracts and say, here are the things that they're probably going to ask for.”
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Andrew said that in earlier roles his team ran small pilots and engaged teams earlier, even when this seemed counterintuitive. He said he would rather lose a deal in 30 or 90 days than on the last day of the quarter after it was forecast. He noted that new AI categories have no standards, so the outcome varies by person and company.
“the sooner you get security involved or risk or legal into these engagements, the better”
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said Jen Igartua (Topline), Keenan (Topline), John McMahon (Revenue Builders)
She says operators have been beating sellers over the head with exactly what to do at each stage and when to send the proposal. Sellers who act as consultants and help buyers through a difficult decision or an organisational bet will shine. She thinks sellers have not gotten worse, and that scrutiny outside the AI-native space, where mediocre sellers can still make a lot of money, probably creates more skill.
“we've lost the like flexibility and the art of sales and allowing, you know, sellers to be consultants.”
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Keenan said a system does not require every rep to do the same thing, and that the organisation should know what outputs it is looking for. Responding to Asad Zaman's point that the best salespeople make in-the-moment decisions a script cannot capture, he said making people do everything the same is structure, not a system. He said he never uses the word structure.
“Making people do everything the same is structure.”
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John McMahon gave the example of a nervous sales rep who scripts who says what before an economic buyer meeting. He said he would rather go in, be himself and act naturally than respond to a script. His advice was to know the strengths of everyone on the team and let them do their job at the right time.
“You can't over choreograph things.”
said Sam Costello (Revenue Builders), Stuart Gwynn (Revenue Builders), Mark Raberge (The Science of Scaling), Mark Roberge (The Science of Scaling)
The speaker said many ghosting prospects had identified themselves as champions, had gone up the ladder and been pushed back, and were afraid to say so. The speakers added that prospects may also go quiet because a competitor had a better price or better matched the criteria. They called the common 'we decided not to make a decision' explanation BS, often hiding that the contact could not get money.
“they actually identified themselves as a Champion they went up the ladder little bit and they got smacked around a little bit”
The speaker said a deal will not close if the contact helping the seller is a coach without the power or budget to push the purchase through. They said this is common, and that many people believe they have a champion when they only have a coach.
“Als mensen denken dat ze een champion hebben, dan hebben ze een coach.”
Sam Costello says a technical contact who can validate the product may not be a true champion. A true champion understands what is happening in the business and is in the room where problems are discussed, and can link the solution to a problem the economic buyer has said they solved, even without tying it to NPS or revenue. If the contact cannot make that link, he says, they are likely a technical coach.
“you're not talking about a true champion because a true champion has influence and access across the organization”
Stuart says a true champion will work with him to get the answer, or will introduce him to the executive buyer, and together they document how the solution saves money, earns money, or speeds revenue or time to market. If the person cannot answer or will not go get the answer, he treats them as a coach rather than a champion. He says quantifying pain depends on having a champion, since no champion means no deal.
“Are they really a champion or are they a coach? If they're a coach, they're either not going to have the answer or they're not willing to go get that answer.”
Mark Raberge said a great champion is willing and able, and that his mentor John McMahon taught him to ask whether they are able. He suggested asking who the security contact is, what questions they will ask and what the right answers are, what happens if security delays for three months, and where procurement will push. The answers show whether the champion can get the deal done.
“They're all willing, but are they able?”
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Mark gives a sample script asking the champion to tell about the last time they got a million-dollar deal through the company, then probing who they worked with, who handles procurement and legal, and what those people's red lines are. He says a strong champion answers confidently because they have done it before. If the champion lacks the answers, he says you ask who would know, and you move on to that person while keeping the relationship friendly.
“Tell me about the last time you got a million dollar deal through this company.”
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Mark credits his mentor John McMahon with teaching him this test: the champion is willing and able, and everyone is willing, so the hard part is ability. He asks Matthew whether he would be a strong champion, saying Matthew is clearly willing but the question is whether he is able to actually get the deal done.
“champion is willing and able everyone's willing the hard parts able”
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Mark lists the questions he used: who the economic buyer is, what they care about, whether anything has been taken to them in the last six months, who the champion worked with when going through legal, and what the red lines are. He says if the champion cannot answer these you do not have a strong champion, while one who has pushed purchases through will know.
“If they don't know the answers, you don't have a strong champion.”
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Mark Roberge, crediting a lesson John taught him, says the able part is the most important to discover, since anyone is willing. He recalls that as CRO he would say he was not the decision maker even though he was, and notes that people who make decisions often say they do not, and vice versa.
“The able part is the most important part to understand and discover.”
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said Keith Peiris (Topline), Bret Taylor (Grit)
Keith said he spent a few hundred dollars on tokens running about 100 versions of the question of whether to do POCs before or after contract. The answer he reached: under roughly $25K, signing the contract comes first, which enables the POC. Above that, with good qualification, they 'absolutely should' do one, assuming enough implementation capacity to do it well.
“So below a certain deal size, you know for us it's around 25k. It's part of the contract you have to sign to to enable and then beyond that with good qualification we absolutely should.”
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Bret Taylor described AI tourism as companies running proofs of concept to show AI momentum under board or CEO pressure, without a business mandate. He said many failed AI projects are AI tourism, with no path to production. He said Sierra's proofs of concept are more often than not paid, because it wants companies that are serious about deploying.
“with our proof of concept, more often than not, you know, we're essentially always paid.”
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Mark said many salespeople assume the product will sell itself once the buyer is in a trial, but it does not work that way. He said that before starting, the rep should define what the buyer will see after the trial that will make them buy, and confirm they have the buyer's commitment. He described this as the scaffolding around the trial experience.
“Before you put them in the trial, you need to define success. Yeah, we can do a seven day trial. But what is it that you will see after the seven days? that will make you buy this product. And do I have your commitment?”
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said Brad Scott (Revenue Builders), Daniel Simon (Revenue Builders), Lou Shipley (Revenue Builders), Frederic Kerrest (The Science of Scaling)
Brad says his inbox is full of low-quality AI slop, and that customers respond to what he calls the IRL stuff, including in-person visits, handwritten notes and drop-offs. He argues that relying on teams of bots and agents is not how buyers want to buy right now.
“The in real life, in person, in your office, handwritten notes, drop offs, all of those sort of like, what's old is new again.”
Daniel and his engineer flew to a large e-commerce customer and met each persona for about an hour to document the current state and quantify use cases. He said in-person work differentiates quickly when outreach looks similar across competitors, and that he learned this early at EMC.
“In person is going to differentiate you very quickly”
Shipley describes selling Avid in Japan, where a customer offered a large order with a request for features he could not understand. He went with his top rep to a karaoke bar with a legal pad and worked out which features the customer wanted. They built them and won what he says was the biggest order in the company's history.
“so it just takes digging in and trying to understand what your customer is trying to solve.”
An oil pipeline servicing company using Salesforce and Workday had two finalists for identity management, and Workday-as-master was brand-new functionality for Okta. When Kerrest's flight was booked for the wrong month, the IT director told him the decision was being made that week and he had to be there the next morning. He took a red-eye via Chicago, walked about two miles along a highway in a blizzard because no cabs were running, ran a two-hour sales call, and Okta won the deal a month later.
“He said, well, there's two finalists. You're going tomorrow. The other guy's going Tuesday. We're making a decision.”
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said Ann Davis (Revenue Builders), Amanda Kahlow (Topline), Randy Riemersma (Revenue Builders)
Ann says the 10-K remains the best resource for salespeople researching public companies, though fewer people read it in full. She says sellers should show up with what they understand about the buyer's priorities and ask the buyer to confirm or correct it, because customers do not want to repeat themselves.
“Showing up with this is what I understand. Is this accurate and what is missing?”
Amanda Kahlow says human sellers usually answer a hard technical question in a few lines and move on to their own next step, rather than restating what the buyer is trying to solve. She describes her superhuman repeating back the buyer's context and then answering with a demo or slide matched to the question. She ties this to solution selling and the buyer's need to feel heard.
“The buyer wants to feel heard”
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Randy says that after open-ended and clarifying questions, the seller should echo back what they heard and ask whether they got it right. He says this often produces a moment where the buyer confirms the seller understands, and he says the buyer will then like the seller more than at any other point. He describes this as a tool available without any technology.
“And we echo it back. Did I get it? Help me correct it.”
said Rick Smolen (Topline), Jeremey Donovan (The Revenue Leadership Podcast)
Rick says sellers need time after a call to think through next steps and strategy. He says he does not agree with a target of putting sellers on the phone with customers 85% of the time. He frames this as a reason sellers should not hand note-taking or processing entirely to a tool.
“the magic in sales is often happening between the meetings”
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Rick argues that a seller's notes are where they process what happened and decide the next action, and that an AI note-taker captures much of the objective content but not the buyer's reactions. He cited an old study he could not detail, in which computer-scored tests gave results without the context teachers had when grading by hand. He warns that a seller who treats note-taking as saved time may see performance decline.
“the computer can't capture the tone, can't capture the nuance, can't capture the content”
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Jeremey Donovan said the company used a tool, homegrown or licensed, that pulled the MEDDIC framework from call transcripts and pasted it into Salesforce. He said it did a near-perfect job, but full replacement of that human step was not effective, and he said the company took the tool out of commission. He thinks an augmented approach probably works better.
“The good news is whatever they were doing again in -house versus tool did a perfect job, near perfect job.”
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said Seong Park (Revenue Builders), Chael Banks ([Un]Churned)
Sales identifies the initial workflow during the land, and outcomes architects grow additional workflows as more teams come on. Notion focused on a consistent language between sales and CS: sales documents the business objectives, the stakeholders and one key workflow the customer wants to implement. That carries into the CS success plan, now called the AI transformation plan. Notion also uses MEDDPICC.
“making sure that our sales team is documenting, you know, the business objectives, the stakeholders and one key workflow that that customer wants to implement.”
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Seong says post-sale teams need a firm understanding of why the customer bought and which outcomes the economic buyer wants, and also what win the champion gets. He says that rooting on those three things gets 99% of the work almost done. He says this information often gets lost unless the post-sale team was involved in the proof of concept or validation.
“what does the EB care about and what does the champion actually want in terms of the win?”
Chael describes value realization as a train where account executives are the engine, identifying value drivers in the sales cycle and framing value points with new customers. Customer success then hooks on and takes primary responsibility for value realization, with technical account managers validating the value the customer bought and driving adoption. He gives phishing resistance as one big value driver in identity.
“I look at it like sort of a train but those guys are the engine”
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said Keenan (Topline), Kyle Norton (The Revenue Leadership Podcast)
He said he asks teams that say they run MEDDIC for the documented definition of each element as it relates to their product and customers, and then how it is built into the CRM. He said reps can tick different metrics and managers cannot say how those metrics drive a sale. He argued that training is over-weighted and the operating layers are under-built.
“Do you know how many times I've seen people say we run MEDDIC and I'm like great run MEDDIC. My first question is could you send me or show me the definition?”
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His restaurant-focused team had called quick ROI math 'napkin math'. The new methodology renamed it 'impact math' to fit the framework's acronym, and he corrected anyone who used the old term until the team policed it themselves. He wove the methodology into onboarding and deal assessment as well.
“the shared language of a team matters a lot.”
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said Sam Jacobs (Topline), Randy Riemersma (Revenue Builders)
Sam Jacobs said that L&D does not always have the mandate for budget, so the sales team still needs to push above that level in the organisation. He acknowledged the traction Outdoo had gained while raising this caution.
“Be careful about selling the L&D. That's what I'll say. Because they don't always have the mandate for the budget.”
Randy says many salespeople think that if the project matters to the champion it must matter to the economic buyer, and he says that is not true. He says the seller has to validate the work with the economic buyer and confirm that it is a top priority for them. He notes that a project that is not a priority for the economic buyer does not get funded.
“So many salespeople think it must matter to the economic buyer. Not true.”
said John Kaplan (Revenue Builders), Eric Gilpin ([Un]Churned), Mark Roberge (The Science of Scaling)
John Kaplan says companies often skip this mapping. Buyers change, marketplace conditions change and the buyer's reasons for buying change. If the sales process is built on an old way of buying, it can miss opportunities.
“I think this is where companies miss it because they don't map how the buyer buys and why the buyer buys.”
At an offsite with revenue and marketing leaders, the team mapped the buyer journey from awareness to conversion on posted notes, on the view that the sales process should map to how buyers decide. Eric said this surfaced breakage in G2's own model that was not serving the buyer. The shared problem statement was that the customer should be the only one that gets credit, and if they win, G2 wins.
“we just basically did a whole like, you know, design thinking posted note from awareness to conversion”
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Mark walks through a Harvard Business School case from Akuno about a warehouse supply chain management software company with four personas: the CEO, warehouse manager, supply chain manager and end user. In the learning stage only the warehouse and supply chain managers are involved, while the CEO becomes a gatekeeper or blocker by the selecting stage. He says this lets you define how each person buys and what each one needs, rather than using a simple awareness, consideration, decision journey.
“they've outlined a buyer journey that has seven steps in it.”
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He framed these as questions about the buyer's role, not the product, and argued the buyer journey should be written as if the buyer did not know the product existed. He contrasted this with listening to sales calls and evaluating close rates, which he said Dini Mehta did not focus on.
“What are the top five problems or opportunities that your buyers are talking about in their role today?”
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She had first planned ROI-based messaging, as her marketing background trained her to think in ROI, but found she did not understand the persona well enough. She said she would aim for ten or more conversations in a new role, and at least five, and that she did not talk about Lattice at all during the shadowing.
“Now, every time I join a company, I'm gonna spend time in the first 30 days doing this.”
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Some were clients and some were contacts in the space. She asked about their jobs, the KPIs they tracked and what they loved and hated, and said that if given the choice between buying online and talking to a human who helps them set up, HR leaders would choose the human. This changed how she planned the sales process for the persona.
“They don't want an automated thing that they can buy online.”
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Sangeeta says the first step is for the product CEO to work out the journey and break it down in plain terms rather than in internal jargon. Buyers only buy when they see a problem that resonates, there is budget, and they understand how the outcomes will arrive. The team tests the journey, learns where the friction points are, and removes them.
“The way I've got about it is, the first understanding is for the product CEO to figure out what that journey is. If you tell them, here's a user journey. Similarly, here's a buyer journey.”
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said Sam Costello (Revenue Builders), Ghazi Masood ([Un]Churned)
Sam Costello says that when reps find pain, build a champion, reach an economic buyer and build a business case, the company and champion start to pull them into a large deal. He calls pitching a large deal early a trap. Harness is comfortable landing where it makes sense, delighting the customer and expanding from there.
“they start to pull you into a large deal. It's not the other way around.”
Ghazi says the team typically starts with a single group such as product and design, lets them see productivity gains for themselves, and then opens it to other departments like HR or marketing. He describes this as the usual playbook rather than a fixed rule.
“Usually we start in with a team and a division and get them ultra successful and comfortable using Replit”
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Merritt says a land at four or five figures naturally expands to low six figures, with the customer sold more product over time. He says the company built plans for years two through five, and that a first sale should create more value than it captures. Leaving money on the table gives the team another opportunity once there is more product to discuss.
“Leave a little bit of money on the table. You're going to get another bite at the apple because we have more product to talk about.”
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Kyle says procurement cycles lengthened in 2023. He says it is easier to get in the door either with a part of the product set that is less risky for the customer, or into one specific team at a larger enterprise to prove the model before going bigger within the account.
“it's easier to get in the door with either a sliver of your product set that's maybe less risky for the customer or into a group, one specific team at maybe a larger enterprise to prove out the model before going bigger within an account”
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She said she tells customers it is okay if they do not give her their full team as software seats, and asks them to give her half their team so she can show what the product can do. She said her company has done the same when buying sales tools, and she would rather have that than a large contract that customers are miserable with.
“it's okay if you don't give me your full team as software seats”
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Kevin Egan said that when going for a land inside a business unit, buyers are not looking for a platform; they have a stick-in-the-eye problem to fix quickly. If the product delivers value and people start using it over the old way, momentum builds. He was speaking about the enterprise motion he helped build at Salesforce.
“it does, to your point, have to be a precise use case that you're facilitating better than anybody else can.”
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said Freya Ward (The Dave Gerhardt Show), Greg Casale (Revenue Builders)
Freya says that if a rep treats a lead from a LinkedIn campaign the same way as one who filled in a website contact form, they are ignoring that the two buyers are in different mindsets. She adds that tech buyers do not usually want to displace a competitor on a large deal based on one piece of content or a LinkedIn message.
“if you treat a lead that's come through a linkedin campaign, for example, in the same way that you treat a lead that's filled out contact us form on your website, they're not in the same head space.”
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Greg Casale says outbound calls typically run two and a half to five minutes, so an outbound-sourced prospect is probably not qualified for budget yet. He gives the example that asking an outbound prospect what got them interested is a poor opener. He says he likes to do some training for AEs, where possible, to set different expectations for the two sources.
“I can identify needs and pain, but I'm probably not qualifying for budget.”
said Carlos Delatorre (Revenue Builders), Mark Roberge (The Science of Scaling)
Carlos said that if a salesperson only talks about technology, features and functions, the business value is not obvious, so the rep has to help each stakeholder see the connection. He said the value must be described in terms that resonate with each role, and the presentation tailored to each person.
“if you just talk about the technology and the features and the functions, it's not obvious what the business value is.”
Mark says less experienced sellers assume every employee has the same pain, while there is usually a general organizational pain but each individual has a different one. Even after six months with an organization, he says a newly important stakeholder like the head of security needs fresh discovery. He suggests asking what they have heard about your solution, whether they have explored solutions to the problem, what hurdles they face and what comes to mind when they hear about it.
“even if we've been spending six months with an organization and we meet someone that might be important to the purchase of this product like the head of security? We have to redo security, redo discovery.”
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Mark describes the economic buyer as ROI-driven, the person who signs the check and wants to know when the money comes back, and the business user as focused on their own growth goals. End users care whether the product is easy to use, saves time and who to call if it breaks, while IT or security staff care whether it is easy to set up, won't cause a breach and can be maintained. He says the content you send each persona should follow these concerns.
“They don't care about ROI. They care about like, is it easy to use?”
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Mark Roberge describes the economic buyer, usually the CFO, who signs the contract and is driven by ROI and payback. The end user cares whether the product is easy to use and supported, and the technical buyer asks how it is set up, maintained and integrated. The champion is usually a business unit head who advocates internally, and a deal often depends on how well that champion makes the case when the seller is not in the room.
“So economic buyer, the first one is an example. That's the person that signs the contract.”
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Donald Kelly said the Formlabs rep was having surface-level conversations with the office manager and giving the same presentation to every contact. The fix was to explain business challenges to one contact and how the product could change dental practice work to another, after which office managers asked to bring in the other person.
“So we started speaking these different languages.”
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said Lauren Hughes (The Revenue Leadership Podcast), Mark Roberge (The Science of Scaling)
Justworks serves small business founders, sometimes one-person companies running payroll for the first time, where multi-threading barely exists. She said methodologies fall flat without leadership reinforcement. Justworks is revising its methodology under a new sales leader and expects to improve it over time.
“there's not a lot of multi-threading when you're talking to a founder who is one employee”
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Mark describes BANT as budget, authority, need and timing, which he thinks was invented at IBM or Intel in the 1970s. He says it is great for small business and mid-market leads but not sufficient to capture the complexities of a million-dollar ticket sale. He introduces MEDDIC as a more advanced qualifying matrix for those deals.
“It's not sufficient to encapsulate the complexities of a million dollar ticket sale”
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Mark said he thinks BANT, which covers budget, authority, need and timing, is fine for transactional, MQL-driven mid-market inside sales. For more complex, higher-level sales motions used for bigger deals, he said something like MEDDPICC is better, and described it as a cheat sheet that helps sellers gather information and score how likely a buyer is to buy.
“I think it's fine for transactional, MQL-driven, mid-market, inside sales. But if you're going to want to make the leap to more complex sales, a higher-level sales motion, often used for bigger deals, something like a MEDDPICC is better.”
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said Anne Gary (Revenue Builders), Brad Scott (Revenue Builders), Sam Costello (Revenue Builders)
The speaker described a benchmark where the prospect gave their team four hours while the competitor had ten hours for the same work. They said the metrics had not been agreed before the proof of value, which made the evaluation hard to win fairly.
“De prospect geeft ons vier uur om naar de benchmark te gaan”
Gary described a proof of value built around products the technical buyers were most interested in, which did not line up with the biggest business problem the economic buyer was trying to solve. She said this is a discovery failure that carries into the proof of value.
“Demonstrated the wrong products in terms of connecting to the economic buyer business problem.”
Gary described a proof of value where the necessary people were not included, so it kept going without a conclusion. She also described two different teams being asked to evaluate the technology separately, which made the results impossible to compare.
“So the proof -of -value was non ending Infinity symbol it just kept going right”
Gary listed these five things and said she does not walk into a proof of value without having all of them nailed down. She said the process needs to cover who the people are, where they go through the process, what technology will be measured, the timing, and the metrics.
“So there's five things i think about in terms oe going into a proof of value.”
Brad says that early on, when companies are begging for people to talk to them, they run into proofs of value that drag on. Four months later they have spent sales, engineering and product time and have nothing, and the deal sits on the forecast for quarters, which is why Glean now sets checkpoints.
“And then it's four months later, you've sunk all of your time, all of your engineers time”
Brad says the second stage of Glean's sales process is the blueprint process, where the team sits with business units such as sales, engineering and legal to map how work gets done today. They then ask whether transforming that process has value and ties to the outcomes the customer wants, and only after the economic buyer is on board do they plug in data sources and systems for a proof of value.
“we call the blueprint process, we actually come into your office, we sit down with you”
Sam Costello says that before the POV, the team should check with the economic buyer whether this is the problem they care about, whether these are the criteria they want to see, and whether they have faith in the straw-man business case, which may only need to be directionally accurate. He also asks whether other people need to be involved.
“is going to see the economic buyer before you do the POV”
Sam Costello says the ideal POV is tied to a business case that states the value of solving the problem, even if it is not fully baked. The POV is then designed to prove the points in that case, with a metric such as how long a task took before and how long it takes now. He describes creating this linkage as the most important step.
“it used to take this long to do it, now it takes this long”
Sam Costello lists the checks Harness runs before a POV: whether there is at least one champion and ideally several, whether the POV criteria are well defined and the team is highly differentiated, whether the economic buyer would discuss changes if the criteria changed, and whether the team knows its competitors. He says the global SE leader and he both sign off on each POV, and that competition is often a customer choosing to do nothing.
“do we have champion, at least one, but multiple champions ideally?”
said Sam Costello (Revenue Builders), Daniel Simon (Revenue Builders), Stuart Gwynn (Revenue Builders)
Sam Costello says in a compliance-style review the rep only tries to prove they already have what the reviewer wants so they can get off the call, while in a hunt the team assumes there is something it does not know and looks for what could go wrong. He says if a rep does not leave a MEDDPIC review excited, something went wrong, since the review should uncover gaps. He adds that if a rep follows a compliance process and still loses, the process loses mindshare.
“If it's a compliance effort, then you're just trying to prove that you already got what that person wants”
Daniel built a qualification agent based on McMahon's book that scores deals red, yellow or green and suggests actions for the next 48 hours. He said ChatGPT-style tools agree with whatever the user asks, so the agent must be prompted to expose gaps and not agree with everything the seller says.
“So you can say be hyper critical of my deal, right? Like expose the gaps. Don't be in agreement with everything I say.”
Stuart says in a deal review he checks whether the rep has answers to the three Ys, then whether there is a champion, then tests that champion. He recommends reviewing with a peer who is not emotionally invested, since that person can look at the deal without knowing the names. He says his own leadership asked him these same questions, and a champion should be able to answer them to their leadership.
“Why anything? Why now? Why Mongo?”
said Frederik Maris (Revenue Builders), Brian McCarthy (Revenue Builders), Bob Kocis (Revenue Builders)
Frederik says discovery starts with understanding the company's pain and the personal wins, fears and pains of the person you are selling to. The better you understand that, the easier it is to build that person into a champion. He says the work is simple to describe but hard to do, and that everything downstream depends on it.
“It starts with the pain and it starts with the potential champion.”
Brian said the job is to help influential people solve their personal and professional problems so they become champions who sell for the company when reps are not in the room. He framed this as the lasting part of the job, separate from any particular technology.
“we don't sell software Champions sell software”
Bob says the great reps he interviewed connected the solution to the pain, and the pain to the buyer's personal win, very deeply. They painted a vision of what the champion and their organisation would look like once the problem was solved. He says this is how a person becomes a champion.
“they really understood how to connect the solution to solving the pain, to solving the personal win.”
Bob Kocis said the great reps understood how to connect the solution to solving the pain and to the personal win of the person they wanted to turn into a champion. They defined that personal win for that individual and painted the vision of success. When customers raised missing features, these reps showed what they had delivered for other customers and explained how they would get the customer there.
“they really understood how to connect the solution. to solving the pain, to solving the personal win.”
said John McMahon (Revenue Builders), Randy Riemersma (Revenue Builders)
The speaker said that if the negative consequences of not moving forward are not quantified, the buyer will sit still and get distracted by the next priority. They said the seller's job is to keep asking the customer what it means, and to make the implication to a business outcome, so the buyer creates their own urgency.
“If you don't actually quantify the negative consequences of not moving forward, then you're just going to sit there”
McMahon described calling a prospect who had earlier said a problem needed solving by October 31 and reminding him of the implications of that date. He said a five-minute call can become half an hour once the implications are clear, whereas without a stated consequence of not solving the problem the buyer stays with daily issues.
“de laatste keer dat we gesproken hebben, had je me gezegd dat als je deze pain, of deze problemen, in oktober 31”
Randy uses personal examples: he would need to win the lottery to buy a Ferrari, and would need a bad doctor's report to change his health benefits. He says the seller should show the current state, its true negative consequences and the cost of inaction, creating both an emotional and a rational reason to move. He says deals that do not start this way will lack momentum and emotion over time.
“Nobody makes big strategic decisions or starts the process in this zone of, you know, small decisions.”
said John Kaplan (Revenue Builders), Alex Bilmes (Revenue Builders), Greg Casale (Revenue Builders)
Kaplan says he hates a handoff and that if two organizations use two different languages and do things differently, the customer will likely not get what they signed up for, so the promise has to be delivered through execution and proof. This builds on Seong's point that he dislikes the term handoff because the AE and pre-sales or field engineers keep engaging after signature and the customer is dealing with one company. Seong agrees that Cursor is not yet consistently operating that way.
“if there's two different organizations using two different languages, doing things differently, that experience is going to lead to a high probability of that not being the same thing.”
Alex Bilmes said the best teams worked an account from every persona, with SDRs handing over to AEs, AEs bringing in SEs, and sales managers, CROs and CEOs looking at the same account. He said this reduced silos and fragmentation and gave continuity across functions.
“the best teams would work an account from every different persona.”
Greg Casale says in his embedded setup, AE calendars are shared in real time, so an SDR can see the booking on the AE's calendar and join the call. He says an AI-generated prep sheet can go to the AE before the call, with a debrief afterward to check whether the meeting qualified. He calls attending these calls an important training opportunity for SDRs.
“if your SDRs are not attending the calls they schedule start doing that right way right away because you're missing a huge opportunity.”
said Jason Forget (Revenue Builders), Brian McCarthy (Revenue Builders)
Jason said the developer enthusiasm around open-source products at Redis was a double-edged sword. Developers loved the product, but they were often solving tactical problems rather than the larger business problems that executives care about. He said the same false sense of security appears in product-led growth motions.
“It was sometimes a double -edged sword in the sense that it sometimes created a false sense of security, especially with our AEs.”
Brian said engineers are often disconnected from the whole application and do not respond to claims like 80 million dollars more revenue this quarter. He said the conversation with leaders is about R&D as a percentage of revenue and delivering more applications faster at higher quality, with a three-point impact given as an example. He said you need both top-down value selling and bottom-up adoption.
“nobody's ever going to tell an engineer what he can use to do his work”
Brian said PLG champions built themselves by using the technology, so sellers were only engaging with them. He said every account has engineers using Cursor and other people who have not yet seen its differentiation, and that the sales team is missing them.
“who has the most influential champions, ends up owning and winning the accounts.”
Dino noted that buyers have often not tested the product, and that multiple technical buyers are usually on calls, so the sales team has to catch them up. Mark warned that people assume PLG deals skip discovery and qualification, but the buying process looks very similar to sales-led once an opportunity reaches the qualified stage. He said the end user often stumbled across only a small part of the product and may not be the buyer.
“I think like we overestimate how much the end user knows about our product.”
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said Sam Costello (Revenue Builders), Stuart Gwynn (Revenue Builders)
Sam Costello says that when a champion resists taking a rep to their boss, it is always down to confidence, because a champion who is sure of the deal is happy to show the rep to their executives. He treats that reluctance as a signal that something is unresolved and needs to be found and solved. When a host tied this to weak discovery, Sam agreed and added that a skipped step in the sales process leaves the champion unsure.
“it's always down to confidence. They lack confidence.”
Stuart says when a powerful champion resists bringing others in, it is a red flag, often tied to a selfish or self-promotion interest. He recommends understanding their incentives and asking why they do not want the executive along, while showing that involving peers protects their career and brand. He says a strong champion who cares about solving the problem will usually come around.
“when it happens, it's a red flag because that person is probably for whatever reason, you got to get to the bottom of it.”
Mark described asking first to join the meeting, which he said works about a quarter of the time. If declined, he asks the champion to walk him through how they will explain the product, then expresses concern that the VP might not be excited based on that explanation and asks again to be present. If the champion still refuses, he builds the slides with them so the VP is walked through content positioned for their priorities.
“Are you sure I can't just be sitting there in the room with you or sitting on the Zoom with you to walk them through it?”
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Andrew said reps who believed they had done a good job let the developer champion carry the message to the boss, and the deal then closed unresponsive in Salesforce. The team responded by framing each engagement around the situation and main impact, being prescriptive about how the engagement worked, and earning the right to take the next step together with the champion. They then enabled champions with tools and technical personas to communicate value to VPs and heads of engineering.
“you let them go sell on your behalf to their boss and guess what you see in Salesforce close unresponsive”
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said Keith Peiris (Topline), AJ Bruno (Topline)
Asked whether AI could improve deal reviews, Keith said he thinks so, with a caveat. Great revenue leaders have strong opinions on what to pay attention to and what to push reps on, and he says that can't be left to chance or handed to a model to work out alone. The leader defines the standards, and the model follows them through skills, knowledge and automations.
“I think you have to sort of set the standards. for how you want Deal Review to run, and then you can get the model to follow, you know, your skills, knowledge, automations on the way you want to run your team.”
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AJ Bruno says that if the company rolls out Dust, which gives pre-sales demo reports to sellers, telling individual sellers very prescriptively which use case to apply it to works better than leaving everyone to their own devices, and creates an aligned sales methodology. He says leaders need to be clear on what teams use, how, when, and how it helps their day.
“with individual sellers telling them very prescriptively, this is exactly the use case that you should be using this for versus just leaving everyone to their own devices”
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said John Kaplan (Revenue Builders)
The speaker said a seller who runs a proof of value without writing the decision criteria in their favour, and confirming them with the economic buyer, leaves competitors an open hunting season. They added that sellers must understand how the buyer will score each vendor, because a competitor may be scored on different terms.
“is het een open huntingseason voor je competitie”
Kaplan says a differentiator has to be taken down to the three-foot conversation, where reps know how to influence the buyer's decision criteria and use discovery questions designed to set traps for competitors. He says the test is whether the customer acknowledges that the differentiator solves one of their pain points and creates value, and without that the path is not finished.
“you have to get customer acknowledgement that your differentiation again is solving one of their pain points and creating value for the customer.”
Kaplan says he has been teaching this for decades and it matters more now at Force Management. Alex agrees it remains true in the new AI environment, and says it holds regardless of how the technology changes.
“Attach yourself to the biggest business issue facing your customers and influence their decision criteria with your differentiation.”
John says the longer a sales process runs, the more the seller takes control and in effect writes the criteria with the champion. He describes asking the economic buyer whether there is any reason not to buy for $1 million if the POV succeeds, then calling the buyer only if the criteria change.
“that's when your sales process moves from unpredictable to predictable”
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John says discovery should uncover pains that only your product can solve, and that the criteria should be formalized with a champion inside the account. Your product is then tested in a proof of value against those criteria, and he says if the POV is set up this way the deal follows from the results.
“If you can't get your differentiators into the decision criteria of the Proof of value then you're probably you're going to lose”
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said Stuart Gwynn (Revenue Builders), Bob Kocis (Revenue Builders)
Stuart says before every executive meeting he builds a sheet with two or three goals and lines of questions, then does research and role-plays with the people in the room. He says the sheet and the role-play let him take the conversation in any direction the customer goes. The host adds that knowledge alone is not enough, because role-play is where the skill is built.
“I'd go role play with whoever's in that meeting or my boss or my SA”
Bob says the elite reps he interviewed named preparation as a recurring area for improvement, and that they did not force preparation as much as they should have. In larger deals with three, four or five people in a meeting, he says rehearsing with the team ahead of the call is critical so everyone understands the plan going in.
“They didn't force the preparation as much as they should.”
Bob Kocis said the sellers he interviewed named preparedness as something they could do better, and that teams often do not enforce preparation as much as they should. In larger deals with three, four or five people in a meeting, he said rehearsing with the team ahead of calls and making sure everyone understands the plan is critical.
“They didn't enforce the preparation as much as they should. So what that means is really just rehearsing with the team ahead of the calls.”
said Ryan Smith (Grit), Joubin Mirzadegan (Grit)
He said he is a buyer himself, with a budgeting process, wallet share and annual planning that decide where his organization spends money. He said the technology and go-to-market worlds need to come together, and that everyone is calling him to sell.
“you're gonna have to be going to go get $10 million deals from organizations”
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Joubin Mirzadegan said technical founders often assume a great product sells itself, and Trae Stephens agreed this is not true. Joubin described a COVID-era pattern where growth looked strong until it turned out no one was buying without active selling. The conversation concluded that when the curve flattens and the machinery has not been built, the company is in real trouble.
“it's actually even worse if you build it and they do come, because eventually they'll stop coming.”
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Mike said LinkedIn tried buttons to let people sign up, and they did not work that well, so the company wanted a multi-channel way to purchase. He said people do not typically make $10,000 to $30,000 decisions without some human engagement, at least in those years.
“And it just turns out that people don't want to make, you know, $10,000, $30,000 decisions, typically without some, at least in those years, without some human engagement.”
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Speaking hypothetically, Marc describes a company that has reached 5 million, then 10 million, and about 500 customers, and says the product works but the team has not worked out enterprise selling. He says this is where many companies go wrong when they move upmarket.
“But you haven't figured out how to sell to the enterprise.”
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Dino said that when he joined Snyk, there was already an understanding that go-to-market was maybe 49% of the product experience and the product itself 51%. He said some deals were won explicitly because of the people in front of customers. In enterprise, he argued, relationships and guidance on sophisticated use cases are important to unlocking product value.
“there was already an absolute understanding within Snyk that go-to-market was maybe 49% of the product experience of the product itself was 51”
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Actions written 10 Oct 2026 from the most useful of 442 recent insights and checked against them.
Alex calls the opener audacious and expects some prospects will refuse. He attributes its success to Kade knowing his audience of go-to-market personas, says sellers should keep experimenting, and plans to test it on his own next dial session.
“I think you are knowing your audience well there because you're selling to these GTM personas.”
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If the prospect sounds annoyed, Kade acknowledges it with something like 'sounds like you get a lot of cold calls,' which he says often opens them up. He says talking with the prospect a little before getting to the pitch always works really well for him.
“if I can talk to them a little bit before I get to my pitch, like that always works really well. So when you say their name, like listen to their tone of voice.”
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Kade usually sends a LinkedIn connection request first and calls later the same day, so prospects often say they saw his request. He says the name-only opener has never failed to get a response. Nick Cegelski, who said he hasn't tried it himself, likes that it lets the seller calibrate tone before committing to an opener and that the bottom-line-up-front ask works as a pattern interrupt that creates curiosity.
“So I'm like, this is Kade from Common Room. I'm calling to book a meeting with you.”
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For prospects with no posts, no hiring, no funding and sometimes no profile picture, Kade still sends his ideas-and-signals pitch and keeps it human, but has fewer signals to use. He says most of the time these are the people who don't respond, and that fortunately most of his ICP is active on LinkedIn.
“Maybe you'll get a response, maybe you won't, but most of the time these are the people that don't respond to me.”
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Alex points out that Kade's pitch named specific signals to watch, so a prospect who ignores it might still think they should be checking Discord more. He says this shows the seller will add value in the first meeting and builds trust. Kade says nearly every pitch he sends includes two ideas the prospect could use the product for.
“my whole goal without bound is to make it clear that I'm going to add value in the meeting even if you never talked to me again afterward.”
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Kade keeps videos human and limits himself to two or three takes, opening with 'hey [name], nice connecting' even though people dislike that line. For companies selling to technical buyers, his current focus, he suggests surfacing conversations on GitHub, Reddit, Discord and Slack. He gives two example signals: specific titles complaining about competitors, and new job changers asking their community which tools to adopt in their first 90 days. He closes with 'worst case we can share how this team booked like 75% more pipeline after one quarter using the strategy.'
“Worst case we can share how this team booked like 75 % more pipeline after one quarter using the strategy.”
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Alex sells 30MPC's team training program. In an example of how such a video would sound, he cites specifics such as hiring 12 new reps, adding four last quarter, and a fundraise last year, then hypothesizes the problem: high growth targets alongside onboarding and ramp time. He describes the program in one sentence and closes by saying that, worst case, he can share some free material that might be useful in the short term.
“The video is sort of the first 90 seconds of what a good cold call would sound like, but I don't have any responses from the person.”
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Alex notes that many sellers write 'I talked to Nate' when the actual conversation was a rejection, so bringing in what was really discussed is more credible and catches the new prospect up. Kade says he usually asks the person whether he can mention them. In this case the contact had gone silent, so he says maybe he shouldn't have named him, and that sellers should be careful because some people might get upset.
“usually I'll ask the people they'll, they'll be fine with it, but this guy just went ghost. So maybe I shouldn't have mentioned his name, but I did, but be, be careful with that.”
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Nick says three messages in a thread create three notifications rather than one. He describes himself as someone who has to clear every notification daily. He calls the effect a small nuance that he feels psychologically increases the chance of a response.
“when you send somebody those three messages into sessions, session, they actually get more notifications than if you just send one.”
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According to Nick, interest-based CTAs such as 'do you want to learn more?' used to be the most effective. The analysis found that an offer of value, such as 'I can send over a couple of ideas or examples,' is much more likely to get the prospect to agree to a meeting or keep the conversation going.
“what we actually learned was that making an offer, an offer of value, actually has a much higher likelihood of getting someone to agree to a meeting and continue the conversation.”
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Nick picked out three layers in Kade's voice note: what a colleague at the account said, the tool the account currently uses and why that colleague wanted an alternative, and a line from the prospect's LinkedIn profile tied to the product's value. He framed the shift as his own impression ('I feel like').
“I feel like now to stand out from some of the AI slop, kind of need to show that you know them a little bit more than just one thing.”
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His voice note to the VP of RevOps covered his conversation with their new product marketing manager, the team's use of Clay, how Common Room differs from Clay (set pricing versus credits, more user friendly), and a quote from the VP's own About section. Kade felt the note ran too long, so he followed it with a one-line text version of the key points.
“that was super long, probably not the best voice note. So I sent like a little message afterwards, like too long, don't listen.”
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The account used a competitor. The VP of RevOps accepted Kade's connection and posted about twice a day, and Kade interacted with every post for about three weeks. His signal was a marketer from 6sense joining the company. That marketer said he wanted the team to look at Common Room and then went silent, so Kade sent the VP a voice note relaying the conversation. The VP replied asking for a demo and called it the best LinkedIn outreach he had seen.
“my signal to reach out was I saw that a marketer who worked at 6sense moved over to that company.”
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Kade says posters don't get many comments, so a relevant one leads them to look at your profile and realize you have already messaged them. He says this has worked only a couple of times, because most posts are company promotion he can't add to. He won't leave an emoji-only or AI-generated comment; he comments mainly on personal posts or on hiring posts, where he tags people from his network for the open role. Alex Murphy said he also sometimes follows up with a like and comment instead of another DM.
“If you can comment on their posts with something relevant, then they're going to go look at your profile because they prep don't get a lot of comments.”
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The 10% are active posters he engages with for a couple of weeks before pitching. Even after pitching, he keeps interacting when the prospect posts.
“No, I'm always pitching probably 90 % of the time.”
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Kade adds a note only with a referral, a person they both know, or when the prospect has moved from a Common Room competitor. In that last case, which he has done about three times, he tells them he knows they are familiar with Common Room, and those requests were accepted every time.
“Probably 90 % of the time, I'll put no note. And it really depends. If I get a referral, or if I know somebody that they know, then I'll put that in the note.”
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Instead of pitching active posters right away, Kade interacts with and comments on their posts and shares them with other people. After one to two weeks he sends the pitch, when they are already familiar with him.
“after that one to two weeks, send them a pitch because then they'll be familiar with you and it's a way higher chance of booking a meeting.”
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Kade says a one-to-two-minute video feels more personal than a wall of text. When a video works, he looks into why it worked and does more of that over time. One video booked a VP of Sales at a 150+ person company: he congratulated them on the new role, noted they were already familiar with Common Room from their previous company, and pointed out the team seemed fully inbound with a big AE team but no SDRs.
“I think it's better than a massive wall of text. It takes like one to two minutes and it feels personal. And if it works, look into why it worked.”
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Sam McKenna says that without time on the calendar the alerts won't get worked. She recommends a daily triage either at the start or end of the day. She does hers in the morning because it's quiet, fewer people are online and Slack isn't busy, so she can review the reports and act on them.
“I personally love to do it in the morning. It's quiet. Not everybody's online yet.”
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She points out that her script avoids 'I'd love to talk to you.' She swaps language like this as often as she can to make messages feel less like a sales pitch.
“love is one of those words I try to kill and use grateful for or appreciative of in its stead.”
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Sam McKenna's script: say you saw them in your profile views, that you work with many of their industry peers on a specific challenge, and that you'd be grateful for a chat if useful. She stresses keeping it short because LinkedIn connection requests allow only 300 characters.
“Saw you pop up in my profile views and wanted to say hello. I work with a lot of your industry peers on solving this specific challenge”
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Sam McKenna's example: a deal is running with a company's engineering team and a senior engineering manager there views your profile. She sends a connection request saying you're working with the engineering team, you saw them stop by your profile, and you wanted to say hello and offer support if they're involved. She says not to call attention to whether they're tied to the deal, since they may be in another division or have heard about you in a leadership meeting, and that this can speed up the opportunity or lead to expansion.
“we're currently working with the engineering team, one of your organizations. I saw you swing by my profile and simply wanted to say hello.”
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Sam McKenna's script is along the lines of 'I was just thinking of you and thought I'd pass this article along.' The content can relate to what you sell, how you can help, or a past conversation about something you both care about. She says the hope is they reply that they were just thinking of you too, and she warns explicitly against saying you saw them view your profile, because it comes across as creepy.
“hi, I was just thinking of you and thought I'd pass this article along.”
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He calls this a '360 approach' to reaching both blockers and advocates. He lists the IT team, the CFO group (for ROI), business teams and merchants. He notes you can't always get access and that salespeople sometimes simply forget.
“You want to hit the IT teams, the CFO group to talk about, you know, the ROI, the business teams, the merchants. You want to cover off on all of that. And it's one, you can't always get access, but two, you forget like you're human.”
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At a semiconductor company, Stiving pitched a new pricing system as returning 5% of revenue as pure profit and could not convince the CEO. Years later, in a similar situation, he went to every person who cared about pricing, found their specific problems, and quantified what each was costing. Leadership then readily agreed to buy. He frames it as making value believable through specific problems, in line with his view that value is the result of solving problems.
“I went around to every person that cared and figured out what their problems were with pricing. And I was able to quantify, hey, this is costing us this much and this one's costing us this much. And I went in with specific problems back to the leadership team and they're like, oh yeah, we got to get this.”
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He doesn't quantify returns on the first call. Later he shows what consultants say pricing can deliver (the high end), bands of what QuickLizard has achieved historically, and break-even numbers so the prospect sees the hurdle, then discusses the gaps between them. He avoids opening with the 25X figure because it can come across as salesy, comparing it to starting with a 5K rather than an Ironman.
“I like to give them in bands of what we've done historically. I like to give them break even numbers so they can see, look, here's what you've got a hurdle. And then I like to have a nice dialogue about the deltas there.”
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If he doesn't think QuickLizard can help, he may take one more meeting and then tell the prospect directly. His disqualifiers are low complexity, selling only a few SKUs, insufficient revenue, or not having the team in place. He frames this as being open, honest and not pushy.
“either they're not complex enough or sometimes they only sell a few SKUs or their revenues not enough. They don't have the team in place. I'll just be honest with them that there's a gap for what I think the cost versus the value would return.”
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He first asks whether the retailer sells mainly through everyday pricing (a Walmart-esque model with infrequent promos) or high-low promotion like some grocers, whether it has seasonality and one-time buys, and whether it relies on markdowns. He says markdowns can be a huge drag on margin and a lot of work to manage. He describes his role as coming in to solve problems rather than sell.
“I just try to understand how they go to market to their end consumer from a pricing perspective. And then I just try to come, I truthfully just come to be a problem solver”
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She said she asks Vercel's founder after every sales call they take together whether she got anything wrong in the pitch, and tries to absorb how he talks about the product. Her view is that if the founder and product managers agree the product is being described properly, that also tells you something about whether the problem lies in go-to-market or in the product.
“get your product managers or engineers in front of customers and watch me deliver the pitch.”
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Most of Paid's demand is inbound from companies struggling to price agents. If the problem isn't owned by the CEO, Paid punts; if it is, Manny gets on the call with the CEO. He says these conversations are usually triggered by board discussions. He doesn't try to predict which customers will win.
“So our question is more like, you know, is this a CEO problem or not? If it's not a CEO problem, we punt.”
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