Essential Sales Skills for the New Economic Reality

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Some sellers made sales without spending the time and effort to hone their craft. They could sell their product as a technical solution. Rather than sell to the business goals today, we'll talk about how to build a team with the business acumen to sell to the buyer's business goals. We are joined by Mike Cavanaugh, who's taken his team through this transition.

MB commercial and enterprise [: 00:01:00

Mike, welcome to building elite sales teams.

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[00:01:12] Lucas Price: Before we get into that, can you help our audience get to know you a little bit better? Tell us a little bit about how you got into sales. And you know, w was it something that, that you feel like you were always destined to or so many of us just sort of fell into it?

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I went to school in New York city. Uh, I studied economics. I really had no plan. During college I worked for a startup and I ran bars in New York city. And I had a goal of never really working for corporate America. My mother and my grandfather worked for AT& T for [00:02:00] collectively 70 years. Unfortunately I was in the bar business in oh 7, 0 8 when the financial crisis hit New York City.

Uh, and I was fortunate enough, uh, at and t the family business much like the mob welcomed me openly in and I really do appreciate what they did. I was fortunate enough to be part of their training program. I spent six months training which I think is fundamentally the foundation for how I started my career and really accelerated my growth as a salesperson.

I did three years AT& T selling to companies like WB Mason, Boston scientific. Uh, then I did a couple of years at Samsung selling smartphones and tablets. I'll date myself. I did start my sales career, uh, slinging blackberries back in the day, you know, for those who. Still remember what those are, who misses their blackberries.

ined, I got into SAS sales in: 2013

And I think, you know, originally I got into sales cause the money was good. And I was young and I was living in New York and that was a great thing. As I've evolved, I think I've really gotten passionate about first helping customers and learning about their businesses. I'm genuinely interested about how our customers make money.

And then, you know, now as I've transitioned into sales leadership and coaching, uh, I'm really passionate about, you know, passing down what I've learned, uh, to this next generation of salespeople and it has changed. And I tell people every day. If you want to be successful in sales, you have to adopt a learner's mindset.

The things I learned 15 plus years ago AT& T. Some of those things still apply, but a lot of those things have changed. And so I'm constantly looking for ways to sharpen my skills and I try and pass that along to, uh, to the folks that work for me and work with me.

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[00:04:09] Mike Kavanagh: Yeah. If I can say not only did I build a great career AT& T, but I built lifelong friendships. I was recently on a president's club trip and one of the other AEs that works in my organization, she brought her fiance and He's now a sales leader and he'd gone through the same training program as I had.

Uh, it's a small world out there, but it's a great network to have when you can find those opportunities.

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What was that for you? How did you what in your background allowed you to have the drive and succeed in sales?

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And you know, I grew up in a household of salespeople and listening to them on the phone and how they made money and that drives to, uh, to give me the opportunities to do things, to go to college, to go to private school. We're kind of the same things that, you know, kind of got instilled in me.

I learned very early on what, you know, quota was and what not hitting quota meant and you know, what forecasting was. So I kind of grew up in that and I loved it. I love the competitive nature of sales. You know, I think I was an athlete in high school. Uh, I played baseball and hockey. I think the fun part about sales is when you get a really good team together.

the gong. Maybe hitting the [: 00:06:00

I say it all the time. You have to be a eternal optimist and a bit of a masochist to put yourself through this every. Every month, every quarter, every year, you're going to hear no a lot, but you have to have that mindset of, okay you know, we lost this one. Let's move on. You can't dwell on the negative.

And I think, you know, my parents, uh, taught me that I would go into the office sometimes with my mom and I'd hear, you know, these A's making, making cold calls and, you know, and listening to their funny stories. And I think that all kind of culminated in me understanding. It's not going to be easy, but if it was easy, it probably wouldn't be as much fun as it is.

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[00:06:53] Mike Kavanagh: As a salesperson, you have to have, you have to, you know, build a good relationship with your customers and your buyers, but you always have to be [00:07:00] questioning. Do they really, can they really get this deal done? Are they really telling you what's going on behind the doors when, or after the meeting ends, what's really going on.

So you have to constantly push that threshold of, you know, what's it going to take, who else is involved in a polite and respectful way. to make sure that it really is a deal that you can tell your bosses and your leadership that's going to close.

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[00:07:38] Mike Kavanagh: Yeah. I think there were a couple of things that led me down that road. First was I had some really good sales managers and I had some not so good sales managers. So I was like, I want to do better than the bad ones. And I want to, you know, live up to the good ones I had. And. You know, I had really good success as an individual contributor.

ool deals and, you know, set [: 00:08:00

And, you know, I wasn't an expert. I was working for a small SaaS company at the time. So there really wasn't like any kind of training to be a manager. It was kind of, okay, go figure it out. But I saw them doing things that I was like, Oh, don't, you know, I wouldn't do that if I were you. And so I took the approach of being hands on Hey, I know I was your peer a week ago.

Now I'm your quote unquote boss, but you know, here's maybe try it this way, or, you know, have you thought about doing this right? And. I think there's people I know who are career individual contributors, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's great. They have a lot of fun. They contribute to the company.

at's what I enjoy. I really, [: 00:09:00

That's what really gets me going now. It's that desire to help others succeed that I think makes really strong managers and leaders in the business.

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[00:09:39] Mike Kavanagh: Yeah. And you have to, you're gonna, you're gonna share the success. And you're going to shoulder a lot of the blame, right? That's the rule of thumb and it's a selfless job. It's, it is the hardest job I've ever had, uh, being a frontline manager. And it, no matter what the size of the company, how well established the company is, there's a lot of pressure on our [00:10:00] FLMs to You know, to be, make sure the deals get done, coach up the A's, you know, make sure they're staying on top of their training.

I think it's as a second line, my job is to kind of help them figure out what's the noise, what's not critical and focus on the two or three things that. Are going to help their team get better and close business and focus on that skill development.

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[00:10:38] Mike Kavanagh: Yeah. I mean, again, I started selling in back in the last, you know, economic recession during the financial crisis in the housing market. And. It was hard. Uh, it was not easy. It's not easy right now. Uh, money's tight. Companies are being more conservative. And, you know, we have a lot of sellers who joined sale, you know, came out of college, became [00:11:00] SDRs, BDRs when People were just buying.

And so they weren't being forced to ask to justify the budget or anything like that. So I think for me back then it was like, Hey, what's going on in the business? What are you really trying to solve for? You know, I understand you want to improve the network speed or you need to issue these blackberries to these people or whatever it was, but It's the why behind what they're coming for, right?

It's the, why did you take this call? Really? What is going on in the business? Either they're trying to improve revenue. They're trying to decrease costs, right? If you're not doing one of those two things or help improve customer satisfaction, it's going to be really hard to drive an opportunity forward.

So I think, you know, one of my favorite, you know, I have a lot of, a couple of favorite questions I like to ask AEs and managers when we're doing deal reviews, but One of the first I do now when I talk to AEs, especially young AEs early on is tell me how this company makes money. What do they do to make money?

to a customer to understand [: 00:12:00

And then we can start to dig into the problems. Cause most, I think a lot of young AEs default to, Hey, we have the best product and we can solve these technical challenges you're having. But CFOs and CEOs don't care about technical problems. They're never, they're likely never going to log into whatever you're selling.

They need to know what are you going to do to their bottom line? How are you going to improve their business? And so asking the business questions, like what's the goal? What is, what does success look like in three, six, nine months? Those are the questions I think AEs need to be asking now and bringing in, you know, other stakeholders, especially, I can't stress this enough for sellers out there.

s on the CFO's radar, right? [: 00:13:00

[00:13:05] Lucas Price: In 2020, 2021, there were buyers that were maybe buying things to solve their sixth or seventh most important problem. And I think today, you know, people are buying things are only buying things that solve their, you know, first, second, maybe third, most important problem. And so the sellers have to have the business acumen. To connect the product that they sell to some of those problems. How do you help sellers develop that business acumen? You know, we had this group of sellers who didn't need the acumen, you know, make the, you know, they were our young sellers a couple of years ago, and now they have to be trained to, you know, given that acumen so that they can sell in a more challenging environment, how do you know, the people who have the skills, they're ready to succeed, but maybe they weren't really taught the business acumen to do that.

How do you help them gain that? Yeah.

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with specific industries. I think one of the things I see now is and Zendesk is a great product and a great solution that can be sold to a wide variety of customers. So it's really important that when they get onto a call with a customer, a discovery call with a new customer, whether it's inbound or outbound, that they have some idea of the industry, you know, and how do they look at the industry and how do they learn about the industry?

Now young AEs can go to chat GBT and say, Hey, what are the top three or four problems facing, you know, uh, SAS financial services companies or B2C companies or X, Y, and Z B2B SAS companies. And they can have that information. It's just using it, teaching them to use the tools that they're just.

often, I've offered this to [: 00:15:00

And this is probably the hardest thing for me as a second line or as a former FLM is not to jump in and take over the call. Just to listen and observe or to listen to gong or chorus. And give feedback, right? And that, that coaching cycle of, Hey, you asked a great question. And this is something I see with a lot of AEs.

They ask a good question about the problem and what's going on in the business. And the customer gives an answer and they go, okay, thank you. And they move right on to the next question, but they don't, you know, double click into the question. They don't double click into the answer.

ry and understand what's the [: 00:16:00

[00:16:16] Lucas Price: One thing I've seen at times is you know, as a frontline sales manager you're maybe who become, who then goes on to become a leader. When you're a frontline manager, you're really like honed in on those sales skills and developing those sales skills, and then you become a leader. And it, we get a little bit further from it.

We still like to talk the game about developing sales skills, but we don't have the same, you know, daily connection to the sellers. How do you make sure that stays part of your organization, that the frontline managers that you have are, you know, have that same kind of development and coaching mindset.

As you get a little bit further from the deals and the sellers yourself.

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And then. At the second line level the larger deals we're asking myself and my peers to be really keyed in on. I always joke, I will always be a salesperson at heart. I still love sales. And you know, last week was the end of our fiscal quarter. I was on, I don't know, a dozen plus calls work and deals with the AEs getting creative.

lean in and help coach your [: 00:18:00

Cause these are more complex opportunities where your experience can help the AEs learn. And more take a seat, a backseat to the smaller, more, you know, standard deals that we're working. And then again, for me, when they get to a certain threshold, I like to lean in because that's my expertise and it gives me a chance to get close to these and see how they're doing, how they're managing them and where I can provide.

You know, real time feedback to them. So I think that's a big part of it.

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Selling to the business goals.

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I think it's you know, first off, yeah, it's understanding the industry and the buyer and the company specific pain points and whether it's an SMB or an enterprise or mid market account, you know, you can find out that information. And then it's. You know, I tell this to A's a lot don't think that your buyers are experts in buying software or buying, you know, anything, they may only do this once or twice a year. Maybe they've never done it before. You have to show them the way you have to guide them through the process. And that really starts with outlining, you know, uh, an upfront contract and agenda with every call. And then explain to them at the end of the call Hey, let's make a decision if we're going to continue.

o. The biggest thing I would [: 00:20:00

There's other people involved in the sales cycle. Ask for those other people to be part of the call. Make sure that whoever you're talking to can bring those other people to the call, because if they can't. This isn't a high enough priority, or we haven't really justified bringing other resources in. And then once you have that discovery call, maybe it's a call with professional services about implementation and what that process looks like, and then presenting pricing is very straightforward.

But showing them up front Hey, here's the steps that we typically go through are their questions and then start working in parallel with, you know, Hey, I'd like to send you our more, our master services agreement for your legal team to review. If you're a company of our size at Zendesk, we're probably not going to modify a lot.

one it. I do this every day. [: 00:21:00

So I think those are the things that that also goes to business acumen, understanding and discovering the pain, but also being a professional and Hey, this is how a sales cycle goes. And You know, that to me is another part of the learning is you have to know the process. You have to know what steps need to be accomplished to get the deal done.

You can't, there's no, there's very few shortcuts in sales. You don't get to skip key steps and think the deal is going to get done.

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[00:21:42] Mike Kavanagh: Yeah. It's being confident that you know the process and you're confident enough to say, Hey I'm going to be your Sherpa. I'm going to be the expert consultant to you. And this is how I would suggest going through this process. You know, and as you get into enterprises, enterprise companies, I've sold the enterprise, they're going to have a procurement team and a legal team and an [00:22:00] it team.

They're going to have their own process, but in S and B commercial, it might be a little bit more fluid. And that's your opportunity to be more of the drive in the driver's seat of how the process goes. And that's sort of, again, it's that business acumen to sit, to be confident and to know your process and be a consultative You know aid to your buyer.

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Uh, to, uh, to avoid,

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Making and again right now in the current financial climate The CFO at any size not any size company, but there [00:23:00] is a, there is somebody from finance that needs to sign off on this. And they need to understand that there is a real problem here that needs to be solved or there's an impact to the business.

People aren't buying software for. You know, minor problems. They're buying software, they're buying solutions, they're buying, you know, results for real problems that are impacting the business today. So I think that's a big one. The other thing I see, and I saw, you know, I saw it last week a couple of times is.

Not getting the, not working in parallel streams. What I see a lot of early sales people do is working kind of in a linear fashion, doing step by step and that's okay, but there's things we can be doing in parallel Hey, we're going to do a demo, but in the meantime, I'd like to share, here's our MSA, here's our security documentation.

're going to do this and the [: 00:24:00

There's a checklist that we talk to our A's about of going down and making sure those things are done. That to me is another piece. I see a lot of mistakes of not assuming that, you know, they're just going to sign off on a 20 page MSA without the lawyers looking at it.

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[00:24:34] Mike Kavanagh: That, that's such a good point because like we'll occasionally do, you know, Zendesk, we can do trials with our customers and. I'm hesitant. Sometimes I've sold software where trials were great. I've sold software where trials just don't make sense. Cause it's too big a lift. Zendesk makes a lot of sense if we're doing a trial, but it's really important that if you're doing a trial with a customer first, set it, set a very clear timeline of how long the trial is and then what [00:25:00] metrics, two or three metrics are we measuring, you know, for us, is it.

You know, handle time on a ticket, first response times, you know, specific KPIs that we can track very easily in the platform. But if you know, having some concrete data at the end of a trial is absolutely important to say, okay, did this work or not? And then the other thing I also recommend during trials is it's not just, Hey, turn over the keys and let them go play with it.

It's all right here. I'm going to walk. We're going to have the first call. I'm going to show you some things. I'm going to help you get it set up. And at the end of the first week, we're going to have a call, you know, see if you're using it, how it's working or their questions have another call. Don't just give them the trial and forget about it.

Have a plan again, have a plan and execute against the plan for the trial to make sure they're seeing the value and that you're solving the problem that they're trying to solve for in the business.

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They've uncovered it's a problem. And then you met, you talked earlier about how a salesperson, a lot of times likes to just move on instead of asking the next level of questions. I think the next level of question is like. You know, what's one of the top metrics on your dashboard? One of the company's top level metrics that this is going to affect.

So for a product like Zendesk, it could be something like NPS, right? CSAT. I don't know if CSAT would be on the top level of metrics for the board or something like that, but maybe. And, or it could be, you know, we want to reduce the, our costs of goods sold and our service costs are part of our costs of goods sold.

And so what are those, what are the key metrics that the company's trying to, you know, that this can affect and then is moving that metric a priority this year, you know, and so that, that kind of can, uh, help you understand whether you're going to get prioritized or whether you're being looked at as a nice to have, right.

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All right what's the impact of that problem, right? What happens if you don't solve for that problem? What's the cost did not doing something. And then the one I also like, three, six months from now. What is the goal here? Is it reducing the number of tickets? Is it reducing the number of agents?

Is it that you've grown and your ticket volumes increase, but you haven't had to increase your headcount because you've got better systems and processes in place. So you've got your costs flat. But you've increased your revenue and lowered your cost of goods sold. Yeah, I think those are all, you know, key things.

going to get every piece of [: 00:28:00

Have a slide that, you know, articulates what have we already talked about? What are the things we've identified as challenges? And then as new people come into the conversation, ask for their thoughts, get their feedback. Are these things aligned? You know, are there other things that are as important, more important?

Do you, does the ranking of the priority of these problems change as new people come under the conversation? That's the discovery piece. Again, people say it all the time. And it's true. Discovery never stops in the sales cycle. And then even after you close them you keep doing discovery because maybe there's future add on product and revenue to, to capture.

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Can you tell us about how that applies in the SMB world?

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We need to understand how we're going to fit into that tech stack and leveraging that conversation. To bring in their I. T. Person, whether they have a director of I. T. Or a manager of I. T. Or maybe they have a third party that runs their I. T. But asking that the other tools in their stack opens the conversation and say, Hey, you know, let's go.

to be, you know, seamlessly [: 00:30:00

I think those are the types of questions that you can ask in a frank way. And if who you're talking to, you know, hopefully your champion or the sponsor of this project is unable or unwilling to bring those people to the conversation. That should be a pretty good red flag that they don't really have.

The problem isn't that big enough to the business that they can pull in other resources.

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[00:30:58] Mike Kavanagh: Yeah, perfect.

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They're looking at new solutions. They've outgrown what they're using right now. And you know, I, we talked about, uh, meeting with IT and meeting with their finance team. And he said that he has the full authority to make the decision and that I don't need to meet with anyone else. What would you, uh, say to me?

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During this process that, you know, I want to make sure we have a seamless deployment of Zendesk to your instance. And I just, if even if we could just get his email, we'll set up a separate call. We can send him some questions. If he can answer those, appreciate that from it. And with your finance, I, you know, back to the finance person if they have that budget, yo here, I would say, Hey, send them the quote and ask them to review it.

Ask for alignment on that. [: 00:32:00

Can I send you the docu sign now? And can you sign it? And that's when it typically falls apart because they go I don't have, I can't actually sign it or CFO or COO has to sign it. That's great. Do they need to see a demonstration of it? Do they, you know, do they have any questions we can answer?

Can we get them on the phone? I also say to the AE or the FLM, this is a chance to use your manager, you know, get them involved in the cycle. They can reach out to those folks and push. And then I can push, and I'm always happy, especially in SMB to reach out to the C suite and make sure, and it's always funny because the C suite will be really straight with me.

send an email like, Hey, so [: 00:33:00

And I'll get an email back in five minutes going, I didn't even know we were looking at this. And. That's not the answer we want, but now I have a dialogue going with, uh, with that executive and we can start to build that executive alignment.

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[00:33:24] Mike Kavanagh: All right.

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What do I do?

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What was the underlying [00:34:00] problem? Because that's where I think probably the misalignment comes from. I would craft an email with the AE saying, Hey, when we spoke, you said this was a challenge and it was impacting your, and if they can't fill in those gaps Hey, you said you were having this problem and it was having this impact on the business.

If he can't, the AE can't answer those two questions. Then we really don't know if it's a solution. We need to go back to the CRO and say, Hey, I know we had this conversation. I understand you have this problem. What I'm still missing is what's the impact of the business of not solving it, right? The other piece I would say is who else have in the organization?

Have you reached out to? I know he's CROs are very busy. Who else have you reached out to his VP of sales, maybe his, you know, his VP of marketing. What about his ops people? I think, you know, sales operations, revenue operations now plays a bigger role, right? Everybody's trying to get the most productivity efficiency out of their AEs.

lling on the rev ops leaders [: 00:35:00

Maybe it'd be good for me to speak to your revenue operations team or your VP of sales. Ask for that introduction to more dig into it.

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[00:35:31] Mike Kavanagh: I'll say it. You know, when I look to build a sales team attitude and effort, Go a long way attitude and effort. You can't teach those. You can't coach those. I can't give you those as an, as a salesperson, as a sales manager, or as a second, as a sales leader you have to bring those to the table and then the skills and the will to learn.

r to help you develop those. [: 00:36:00

And the biggest thing that's benefited me in my sales career and the other six successful salespeople I've seen is they're always trying to learn. They're always trying to get better. They've adopted a learner's mindset for their career. And they're never satisfied with the status quo of how they're doing it today.

So I think those are the things there's some. There's some things I can't give you, but there's other things that you have to bring to the table for yourself. And and remember it's fun. Most of the time we're not saving the world. We're just selling stuff. Don't take it too personally. It's just a sales number.

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And then, you know, and help them realize also that as you go through the sales cycle, discovery never ends, you know, you're continuing to discover the whole time. So those are some of my takeaways today. I appreciate you sharing that with us. And uh, if you enjoyed this episode of building elite sales teams, please podcast app.

You can find more of our content online at yardstick. team. And if you have any feedback for us, you can connect with us on LinkedIn. Thank you for joining us today.