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The Changing Realities of B2B Enterprise Sales

Show Notes

Join Asher & Kelly as they host Jamal Reimer on this episode of The Unearn Podcast. Listen in to Jamal share insights into the changing realities of B2B Enterprise selling, training SDR’s and having a slight dose of skepticism when running a deal. 

Key Takeaways

0:52 - GTM from a B2B Enterprise seller perspective.

6:33 - Changing nature of the buyer journey with more millennials coming into positions of power. 

7:33 - Getting that 4.6 star review

10:36 - Is it the end of the SDR model?

18:14 - Training SDR’s

22:23 - Uncertainties in an SDR’s journey

26:46 - Traits required to excel at Enterprise sales

31:07 - An intelligent interviewing process to find the SDR with the right mindset.

"The SMB mindset, the mid market mindset and the enterprise mindset are three different mindsets. It's almost like you have to fire yourself as an SMB seller or mid market seller, when you're gonna go into enterprise sales."

Resources

Enterprise Sellers Community


Transcript

Asher Mathew

00:02

Welcome to unlearn where we talk to industry leaders about unlearning how we go to the Market.

Kelly Sarabyn

00:05

I'm kelly sarabyn an Iran tech partner in enablement and advocacy at Hubspot

Asher Mathew

00:09

And I'm Asher Matthew, co-founder of the partnership Leaders.

Kelly Sarabyn

00:12

The old ways of going to market are getting more expensive and less effective

Asher Mathew

00:17

To thrive in an era of digital transformation. you have to go to market differently. Let's find out how.

All right, Kelly, we're back on the show, it's doom and gloom. As usual, we predicted this, and today we have somebody super special Jamal, thanks so much for joining us, awesome to be here. I know we took some time to get this episode scheduled. I think we did what like reschedule like four times or five times or something like that

Jamal Reimer

00:46

And then we stopped scheduling and came back To it.

Asher Mathew

00:51

All right, so tell us what's new, what's, what's on top of your mind.

Jamal Reimer

00:57

I've been deep in the world of going to market from a b2b enterprise seller perspective for a while. so it's like that's super top of mind and it's been very consuming and I feel very boring because it's like the only thing that I've been doing for a while now, so that's kind of like where most of my learnings have been, I am seeing some feels like it's some collective aha moments that have been coming, you know on the way for the last few years and it's nice to be here now, which is that I've kind of been seeing this confluence, there's been one big kind of driving force or, or, or market reality, which is there's just been a ton, a ton of startups that got money in 2017, 18, 19

And they started their journey kind of as this bunch and then they went through the maturity curve of trying to grow up, survive and grow up. And along the way the vast majority that you know, kind of the standard has been velocity sales, right? And that made a lot of sense at the earlier stages, but a lot of them got more money and started to grow fast and there came a time when it was time to go upmarket for multiple reasons, one just to get larger deals. But then there was both the pandemic and now this downturn and now lots of funders and management are advising the teams to go more and more toward the enterprise because they're stable or more stable than the smaller companies etcetera. And then the third influence is now kind of the rise of the CFO or the rise of the financial function

Almost dethroning the CEO or at least in the eyes of sellers because you know, we used to think it was the line of business, maybe IT That made all these decisions and now everybody's getting trumped by the CFO or the whole finance department and so these multiple forces are turning into conversations that I'm having with Cros which are basically like it's time to learn strategic selling.

It's time to move. Some of them are saying move away from the velocity sale. I was on a call with a CRO Just last week and she was saying I'm in a venture-backed company where serious C And almost by definition that means that we are focused on the next two quarters that are our whole world and if we and I refused to stay there and a condition for me coming and taking this role was that we have got to look toward finding the right deals and the right partners. That's what she said to find the right deals and the right partners. And if we do that we can transform our company. But if we stay in this two-quarter world we'll never get hyper-growth.

Asher Mathew

04:06

You know, everything that you said makes sense. the one thing that I'm always curious about right is when this CEO role started, it was supposed to be this revenue operator role and it just became a forecasting role because the CEO needed somebody to go get the most accurate forecast from all of the field right and bring it back up and before the CRO The Ceo did it himself, you know, and so um and it's a shame because like like it's needed, you need one function, one role that brings all of the let's call it four horsemen of revenue like sales marketing customer success and this step together and it doesn't have to be C R O B C C, you can call it whatever you want, right? But that role was supposed to be an operator role and now it's become an even more functional role unless you're in a very large company, right? Like if you're a serious BCC company, you're effectively E V P of sales and then you have to work with your other counterparts and you're in most cases not operating the entire go-to-market engine, you're just operating your sales function, and collaborating with everybody else.

Kelly Sarabyn

05:20

Is that what you see in Jamal, does that align with what you see in the

Jamal Reimer

05:24

Market? I mean I would say my visibility across these functions is relatively limited. so my whole background was I was in I c I was an individual contributor forever and even then I didn't even know many people and it was just me and my team and I was heading down for like forever like over a decade. And since leaving now I start to talk with lots and lots and lots of sellers. Now that's changing too. And now more and more of the conversations are happening with VP directors, VPs, and now CROs, but I'm not in deep dialogue with revenue operations yet. I'm not in deep dialogue with the CMOS. So I don't wanna. I don't have enough data to say, yeah here's my experience.

Asher Mathew

06:10

Kelly always does this to me. she always says like hey let's fact check Asher by

Kelly Sarabyn

06:15

Trust but verify. but actually, I wanted to circle back to something Jamal said about the sort of I guess you would say buyer's journey which is related to the seller's journey because the seller needs to accommodate the buyer's journey. We read a lot of research from multiple places saying that, especially as millennials are coming into positions of power, they want a more self-serve journey and they want to spend less time researching and more time talking to people in their networks.

And we also have this product-led growth movement right? Which is a great fit for the SMB but we do see people arguing, it's great for enterprise too. So I would be curious. Do you see in the enterprise sales process those two trends convincing themselves that the enterprise buyers are wanting to interact less and less with the AE

And also looking to have a more product-led growth tied into that I think you could have just been research-based or you could have a product component. We see that with a lot of enterprise developer tools, they do have something that the developers on the lower levels can play around with. But I'm just curious. I mean, are you seeing those two trends in the enterprise space?

Jamal Reimer

07:33

I am and this is the silliest analogy that just came to me and it might sound terrible but this is the image. I always think an analogy, this is what came to me and it's from my experience is like you know, I was enterprise Celera oracle forever and then some smaller companies before and after that and I try to focus on doing some of the larger, the more complex deals whether it's the PLG Motion or the buyers desire to have less interaction with an a in my reality and kind of these bigger engagements that were like mission big time, mission-critical solutions that took a lot of software and a lot of people, it's kind of like you know when you're when you were in high school or middle school even and you'd have a party in the basement but your parents are still upstairs. So it's kind of like the buying journey. Can replicate that somewhat. So in my experience, I would try to step out of the way as much as possible and facilitate whatever experience the buyer wanted to do and pretty much kind of just make sure that it happened rather than be in their face with it all the time. And I can give you some examples. So one example is I would introduce customers to each other.

And then I'd leave the room and just let them talk. We were in an RFP situation once and I got the entire team from the company that was doing the RFP. It was like 20 people. We got on a plane and we went to another city and we visited another customer who was also a software company. We're both software companies and they were both using my product. Well, one was using my product and the other was thinking about it. So I got them to go and spend time and some of the time we were all together and you know, talking up the storm. But I was in the back, right? And I was letting the customers interact with each other And that kind of sealed the deal because when they came out of the room and gave us feedback when we ultimately won, they were like, yeah that thing that you did taking us there and letting us run with that. That was the thing that got us because they gave you a 4.6 right? They didn't give you five, they gave you a 4.6 and they told us the bad stuff. So at least we knew where the skeletons were and there's gonna be skeletons

Kelly Sarabyn

09:51

Everywhere we took you if you go on amazon dot com and a product has like only five-star reviews and they're all positive. You're like this was all paid for by the vendor, right? But if people give a more nuanced response where they're like everything has drawbacks, right? And they call those out. I feel like it adds the authenticity that buyers are looking for today. And I love that you did that because I think one of the reasons vendor A Is coming in later is the skepticism and the lack of trust that's accrued.

So I think you're creating that opportunity and facilitating them to have that direct connection with a third party that is going to be more trustworthy than you because you're biased. I think that that's a great sales tactic.

Asher Mathew

10:36

I just wanted to dig in a little bit because there's also this other point that you made which is sort of meant Is it like the death of the SDR function? Right? Because like we've been in a world where we trained these people to just say stuff when they hear stuff but not like have good conversations to uncover real pain and real problems and that's the playbook of repeatable SDRs that's been going on for the last 10 years and now if all those teams have to move to enterprise selling, which really like requires you to think and you know kind of be where the customer has been before and come with like real-world examples and like and the real-world proof is that where we're heading like are you gonna are you do you think we're gonna see like less and less of this SDR motion now and the A's have to go back to the old school way of being an AE And hunt for themselves.

Jamal Reimer

11:36

What a great great question. I haven't thought of it that way. like is it the death of the SDR that has been true for a long

Asher Mathew

11:45

Dramatic

Kelly Sarabyn

11:46

Dramatic

Jamal Reimer

11:50

Is your life at risk?

Kelly Sarabyn

11:52

You know, SDRs are listening to this after the emails coming in right now.

Asher Mathew

12:01

Well, you know 11 audiences that are not going to listen to the show.

Jamal Reimer

12:07

One thing that's been true. so there are multiple players on a team and there are one on one relationships that need to be managed among those multiple players. and it's funny I'm gonna do a session in a couple of weeks to talk about the relationship between the seller and the sales engineer. Well, now we're talking about the relationship between the seller and the SDR.

And SDRs kill themselves, right? They kill themselves. It's a tough job. It's a repetitive job. It's the most rejection of any of the segments and at the same time, lots of sellers, especially at the large, you know, portfolio tech companies like where I came from. I think that there's a general lack of appreciation for what they do and if they don't see massive results. Like I saw guys, you know at oracle just blow through OD Guys and saying she's not getting the results to get me another, he's not getting the results to get me another. And so there's a there's that, sorry kelly, you want to say them,

Kelly Sarabyn

13:10

Oh no, I was just picturing general throwing bodies at a problem when you were saying that because I think uh you know as you said, it's a very tough job and I think it, you know usually have people fresh out of school being told to essentially just randomly harass people cold. they're not being set up for success as the role currently is that most companies and I'm just seeing this person on high just throwing more and more bodies at the problem which is not an elegant solution.

Jamal Reimer

13:39

Well it's exacerbated when it is at the end of the SDR, is it, is that where you're going back to?

Asher Mathew

13:45

Yeah. That's what I was because just saying that these people aren't successful and keep throwing them at this problem and then everybody wants to move upstream to be safe. right? and I mean this week's playbook is so different, right? because they said growth at all costs and everybody goes and hires like 50 SCRS And then they like, you know on one side there go to the market directly on the other side they use marketing to start the inbound funnel and they're just experimenting, they're like which way is this gonna fall and then whichever way it falls and you see results, the other team transport quite frankly has to go, you know, and then now you're in a world where we're like, hey everybody has to be profitable and VCs just don't have that word in their dictionary. Like you open the Merriam Webster, BC And the profitability doesn't exist there, right? Because that's just not how they operate right there. They're salespeople giving money to go put the money at the highest leverage and get a high return back. Right? So it's interesting like, like, like the whole piece of where we are right now in terms of like how does it go to be a market leader? Actually think about their plan for 2023 24 25, and I don't even think people are going that far, I think they're just gonna say we're gonna take it one quarter at a time, which by the way they learned from Covid, because after people understood what's happening in Covid, they were like, forget like three quarters. Well let's just do 90 days and all of the investment that follows that now, what you just said, which is super interesting because, you know, during Covid the CRO Still was able to make decisions on investing in, you know, programs and projects and tools and now you have the CFO and how do you, how do you get to the CFO, which I think you have some experience

Jamal Reimer

15:38

With. yeah, let me finish which is straight I think so, so I see any territory as an investment portfolio in which you have to choose what levels of risk are you willing to take on in that portfolio. And I think that the STRS matches well with low ticket, high-velocity sales place now. I think that that slice of the portfolio pie is going to thin, because it's not very profitable but it's easy, it's more predictable and so it has a place in the pie but now they're going to increase the slices that are either the medium risk or larger size. And SDRs will be challenged to do cold outreach to hire stakeholders within customer organizations to begin a conversation. But that's where the conversation needs to begin.

Because you gotta go high to say, okay, I got a solution and it covers a problem. But is this problem something that you care about right now and is this something that you care about enough that your CEO will that your CFO will fund it? And it's like don't do a demo, don't do anything more. Don't spend any, don't spend an ounce of human or technical resources until you get a Yeah, it's in the wheelhouse of a problem. We need to fix And that's a hard conversation for an SDDR two.

Asher Mathew

17:18

Yeah. which is the discovery space right like that? that's basically what you're supposed to go in and refine the problem and uh and make sure it's real pain and you know, get the whole thing down and it feels like back in the day you used to have inside sales that would have done that right? because they were a little bit more sellers than just the str function we have today.

Jamal Reimer

17:42

Yeah, I didn't want to derail where you wanted to go, I kind of wanted to finish on that thought. it sounded like you had a whole another topic you wanted to get to. but long story short, I think SDRs are still gonna be around, I think they're going to be used for a small, a thinner slice of the pie, and there will be more investment in a more strategic sale and that's not just at the enterprise level, that's a commercial and smb as well, but I think there's going to be a priority to start conversations at a higher level than where they're starting?

Asher Mathew

18:14

Yeah, I agree with you. Do you feel like there's enough enablement in the marketplace for these people to learn how to do that? or like how would you train these people because they just have an environment, right? Or would you just go hire different

Jamal Reimer

18:31

People, there are just buying the capability that already exists. That's one way up. The second way is trying to do it through training and the third way to try to do it is through learning from peers.

Um and I guess a sub, somewhere within that is coaching like coaching from your manager or coaching from an external source and I mean, you know, you're, you're tearing me up for this because this is my day job coaching, which is great. But one thing that I was surprised to learn from our community, you know, enterprise sellers, the enterprise sellers community, I was, I was kind of surprised to learn that one of the top gripes or lamentations of enterprise sellers is that whether they love their manager or don't get along with their manager, in either case, they don't get the coaching, like the deal coaching that they want either because the manager isn't good at it or they could be good at it or capable, but they're just too dang busy and then, you know, over and over the reps say things like I only get a half an hour with my manager and he has to just go through the pipeline and it's just what's in salesforce, that's it. But what I want is somebody to roll around, you know, what's the best strategy for this account, this personality, you know, how, how should they be dealt with etcetera. So that has come out to me to be like a massive pain among sellers

And then the second thing is just to complain if you want to go upstream, it becomes more complex and when it becomes more complex, there are more variables and so it cannot be a formula, it's got to be a

Kelly Sarabyn

20:22

Framework. yeah. and I don't think you can throw someone in who's inexperienced 22, fresh out of college, and say just go figure out how to talk to these higher level decision makers because it's just not that easy. And I think it's interesting what you say about coaching versus training because I think at least at larger companies, you usually do have training available, which is very different from coaching. Right training is usually like self serve materials, you can, you can consume courses you can take, which I think to try to provide some frameworks, but if you're going to stick with hiring fresh grads out for this role, I think you need the coaching component, to be successful. Otherwise, I think to your point, the people that will thrive can find that coaching for themselves elsewhere, whether it's appearing on their team, someone they're paying for services, or just networking and they find someone to mentor them, but organizations are not doing a good job of providing that in house

Asher Mathew

21:28

You have and why are they not able or why are organizations not able to provide this? like why are the managers not able to provide this in-depth deal coaching? well,

Jamal Reimer

21:38

It's a few things. one is, they're, they're strapped for time, they just either have teams that are too large or you know, hotter deals than that, you know, that that rep is not a part of that, they've got to manage through or they're managing up and they've got all these reports to put together. So it's, it's a time thing or there are lots of cases where managers are good managers, but they got into the management role after having only a few years as an individual contributor and so they don't know how to coach through a more complex sale because they've never gone through one themselves. So they're, they're willing but they're not experienced enough to be able.

Asher Mathew

22:20

Yeah, that's what I actually thought was actually, so I can see it. so I have been in two, let's call them growth companies right? There comes a time where, you know, there's just so much pressure and everybody's trying to kind of work on the system to make sure the system is correct. But then, you know, the people who are supposed to do all of this coaching are either totally inexperienced or I would say in most cases, even if they want to help, they just don't have time because the velocity pressure is just too much and that's what this like growth at all costs um type of like, like mission actually does inside of a company and then the best survive and then the whole hypothesis is like the best will survive and the ones that don't, couldn't get it done and then they become labeled as people that can't get it done. It's not actually that, that people would love to try and in most cases, they can get there.

Uh, but those people are also shooting for like, hey, if this becomes a $7 billion company, I'm going to retire, you know, so like this whole thing comes down to a really bad experience for the front-line reps. So I can, I can attest to both of those things were like the time and the capability piece are both the problem

Jamal Reimer

23:39

Part of what you just described was like my whole 1st 10 years of selling, which was, I wasn't coached well by most of my manager's couple were good. I didn't get it. So I just fumbled along to the point where I got fired twice in a row for underperformance, like twice in a row and then I was just, you know, kind of reeling and then I got a job and that job was at oracle and, and, and a few years later I got into a selling reality where I had to potent mentors and they didn't tell me what to do as much as how to think about it, How to think about the scenario, how to think about the problem, how to think about the person and it was those, aha moments that just changed everything And that's why I'm not a big fan of methodologies. I like frameworks. To me, a methodology is relatively stepwise or formulaic and I'm overgeneralizing just to make the point. A framework is some pieces that you can move around that have flexibility based on whatever scenario you happen to find yourself in any way. Yeah, I'm agreeing with what you're saying. Yeah, sure that the reality that the reps find themselves in is often unguided, and a lot of the time, their lack of success is not their fault. I don't wanna know. I don't know what to say if it's not of their own making. But it's like man if you just help them see the forest for the trees, that person could be good. She's not good right now. But she could be if you just helped her understand. And as soon as you turn that vision on, she's off to the races

Asher Mathew

25:25

And some super remarkable people have done really large deals, right? like you don't need a Stanford degree for this stuff. you just need to make sure that you have enough to know how to manage the process and at the end of the day it is a process right? Because those companies before us and actually like I would say people before we have trained how other people buy for decades, right? And so everybody's running some sort of a process, some sort of evaluation cycle. But the experience inside the cycle doesn't require a Stanford MBA it just requires that the person who understands how to navigate and it's cool, calm and collected, and curious, and then you know tease this thing up properly. And then there are some proven tactics you know many of them come from your community on how you navigate enterprise sales well. So like for the people listening to this thing, you know, Jamal helped me understand how to do enterprise sales. So that's why I kind of wanted him back on the show too.

And the stuff that he talks about actually works well. And uh and so if you're listening and if you have friends that are curious about enterprise sales I will go check this community out and you'll find a lot of people that are very high-income earners in there and they're just regular people. You know they're not.

Kelly Sarabyn

26:44

I'd love to hear your thoughts on Jamal because I think it is interesting in terms of what are the traits of a person who is going to do well and excel at enterprise sales. I mean it's a very social job, right? Your social intelligence is probably more important than your IQ. But I would be curious if you sort of have assembled in your head what are some of the traits that ultimately are going to be beneficial in that role and enable people to thrive and be successful because I agree it's certainly not a degree, right? And not a particular degree.

Jamal Reimer

27:20

Really good question. A few things come to mind. it's somebody who can play chess instead of checkers

Kelly Sarabyn

27:30

With people with

Jamal Reimer

27:32

People.

Asher Mathew

27:33

Yeah, wrong.

Jamal Reimer

27:38

I mean, okay, so let's say your first point. The first point was the social element. That social element is key. and I've had a few kinds of impassioned conversations about the priority of the relationship builder in terms of the skills or qualities of a competent enterprise seller. It's essential. It's near essential. I've seen some guys do it who don't have great relationships but they can pull off some sizable deals too, let's say it's super important when matched with the ability to dig and dig and dig until you find a gem of a problem statement or generally called an insight. Because we're in the open market and lots of people are trying to sell stuff and lots of people are trying to fix stuff. So if we are going to unearth or engineer or discover whatever you wanna call it a sizable B two B transaction, we've got to be able to work to be able to look and find some gold or gems or whatever you wanna call it that others have either overlooked or not found for some reason because if we just go in and say I got a widget? The widget does this,

That's so superficial, it's gonna pass by everybody because they keep seeing all these sellers saying I got a widget, I gotta widget, I gotta widget, but when you dig deep you're no longer acting like what a seller would look like. Normally you look more like a detective or a consultant or something like that. And that's kind of what I there's what I mean when I say playing chess instead of checkers they have to think in more complex structures, both about the problem and about the network of people involved because there's gonna be a ton more people at the customer you gotta worry about, it's not just one or two and there are a ton more people within your company because the deal team is not gonna be you and the sales engineer as a, it's not gonna be the seller and the sales engineer, it's gonna be a deal team of five or 10 or 15 people.

Asher Mathew

29:50

And I just would have quickly pointed it out right here because people don't listen to it. and I think even in my journey as an smb seller I have aspirations or massive aspirations to become an enterprise seller because, that's where they think all the money is right, which is true, right? But the smb mindset and the mid-market mindset and the enterprise mindset are three different mindsets. It's almost like you have to fire yourself as an smb seller or mid-market seller when you're going to go into enterprise sales and it's a very tough, I would say mindset shift to make when you have had seven years of coaching and training to go, go, go.

And so there is a transition that happens and I would highly recommend people listening to this podcast, it's like if you want to be in that world, find a mentor or find a coach or join the community or like wherever you want to be because like this is not something you're going to be able to switch on and switch out. There are very few people that can just pivot on a dime, right?

And but it is a realization that like the mindset does need to be changed to do this and I wanted to point this out that Jamal was like saying this uh saying his statement

Kelly Sarabyn

31:07

Yeah. one thing I wanted to go into too is for cross or heads of salespeople who are hiring other than previous success in the role, is there a good way to run interview processes where you can get to those traits that you just identified and kind of flag them because, in my experience, I think hiring salespeople is hard um and to go beyond just someone saying I have this record, right, which depending on what it is, can be a great green flag. But any advice to people who are hiring

Jamal Reimer

31:42

One thing that I say is a green flag instead of a red flag for me is downplaying and skepticism. When you talk with somebody good at this, they're often a natural skeptic and that doesn't mean that they're not also optimistic about the possibilities of a deal. But they're always looking for either what could go wrong or what are the gotchas or you know uh it's not like they have to be snarky about it. But uh so what I would do if I was hiring somebody is I would either uh say walk me through one of your deals or okay you know here's a scenario, tell me how you would think through it. And then I would start to poke around, particularly how they would deal with some of the more complex issues which are political realities within an organization and the dynamics between executives within the customer organization. How they also manage the relationships with internal resources especially executives and also partnerships. So I think one of the most senior arenas of enterprise sales is selling with partners.

And what I mean by that is that I can only speak to the partnerships that I've experienced which is where you get a software company or a tech company and you get either a management consulting or an IT Consulting company. And together they form a partnership to deliver outcomes to the ultimate client or customer. And so in my experience, I've been at the Oracles Osama's of the world and we would work with the Deloitte's and the egg centers of the world and everybody had different roles but it's a whole third leg to the stool. So you're dealing with the political or business reality among players of the customer, same thing with your players and now with the partner as well. And I could go super deep into all this stuff but that's kind of when you can discuss all three of those and see how the seller thinks then you know if they've been there and done that and how well they do it. 

Asher Mathew

33:59

You Just hit on our favorite word, partnerships, you know

Asher Mathew

34:06

Well actually that's probably our favorite word skepticism but we'll call it partnerships with this one. I think we're gonna have to have Jamal back on the show because as this show or this episode got us deep into like the minds of like how enterprise sellers become enterprise sellers and you know the coaching element of like why it's tough to provide coaching and stuff.

I think we're going to leave I think we should leave the audience hanging a little bit and bring in well on back unless you have some other thoughts because you always have

Kelly Sarabyn

34:33

One last point that I want to circle back to is the CFO. I think that was such an interesting comment and what's super interesting about it is, you know how knowledgeable is the CFO going to be about every single software domain, right, when they're kind of having input on these decisions. So I don't know, Jamal if you have, you know, some tips for people who realize now that they need to get the CFO on board and what they can do particular to that role to try to move it forward if there's either resistance or a lack of clarity there.

Jamal Reimer

35:09

Yeah. You know, there's a lot of chatter about the CFO, it's the CFO as well as the whole finance organization. So some organizations are quite formulaic in how they manage finance, which includes purchases and others are a little bit more ad hoc. So there's a spectrum, so again you can't run it as a formula. And I always like to say enterprise sales is the only challenge where you're encouraged to cheat by getting somebody to tell you the answers to the test.

So instead of guessing or conjuring up some great strategic plan, I just go to the customer and I'm like, how does it work with you guys? I mean is it gonna number one, is this kind of a thing important to you? Number two, Do you know if the CFO or the finance department would support it is the kind of thing that they're going to fund this year and how do you know I don't wanna burn a bunch of your time and my team's time? If we both love this thing, we get to the second, you know, the two-yard line, and then the CFO shuts it down and when you can start from a place like that, they're gonna appreciate it too because it's happening all the time. So what I would do is I would go to the person I'm dealing with right up front and I'd say does it even that's the skepticism coming out, right? It's a communication from the rep to the customer. It's like, I don't know if this is gonna go anywhere. I'd love to show you what I got. If you think it's gonna help you. But even before we can do that in today's environment, don't you think we need to go get permission for mom and dad, meaning the finance department?

So it's now a very early step to kind of be a gating factor to all kinds of activities.

Kelly Sarabyn

37:00

I like how the enterprise salespeople are having parties in their parent's basement and cheating on their tests. don't read too much into it.

Asher Mathew

37:12

How do you scan for that? Let's go talk to mom or dad and be part of the hiring process. Alright, I think this is great. We learned a lot about Jamal. Thanks for coming to the show. We're gonna have, we're gonna bring you back on a little bit later in the series and uh and go through the other 33 points because I think you just have tons of information on how people should think about enterprise sales and as everybody makes their way through it. But thanks again for coming on and best of luck in your, you know, all the ventures that you're involved in.

Jamal Reimer

37:41

Thank you, guys. It was great being here. I look forward to coming back.

Kelly Sarabyn

37:46

Thank you for listening to unlearned subscriptions wherever you listen and visit www. unlearnedpodcast.com for the transcripts.

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