Tech Sales Insights

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is the last part of our conversation with Kevin Connolly, SVP of the North America Mid-Market at Dell Technologies. He shares his insights into the importance of partnerships when it comes to medium businesses. Kevin also talks about how building trust and confidence has changed over time across different generations.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Partnerships as a key piece to the sales puzzle
• How do all generations build trust and rapport with clients without face-to-face meetings?
• Kevin and Randy discuss their mentors

QUOTES

The difference between generations in getting trusted relationships fast - Kevin: "This generation of buyers want it a different way. Their version of trust and confidence might come through social media, it might come through text, or through email. What I perceive as building trust and confidence comes through servicing them really well in the way that they want to be serviced."

Leveraging the partner community's reach - Kevin: "Sales partnerships are critically important. But if you even think about this as not too much of an intellectual concept, our job at this type of business at scale is to bring new customers. We have a lot of opportunities to do that even if you just look at market share alone."

Find out more about Kevin in the link below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinconnolly222/

Send in a voice message to us: https://anchor.fm/salescommunity/message

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is brought to you by: 

Sales Community | https://www.salescommunity.com/

Dell Technologies | https://www.dell.com/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is the second part of our conversation with Kevin Connolly, SVP of the North America Mid-Market at Dell Technologies. He shares about taking advantage of technology to inspect and provide feedback for those working remotely. Kevin also shares how ramping, productivity, and the sales cycle in the remote work environment have changed since Covid.

HIGHLIGHTS 

• How do you inspect in real-time those who are working remotely?
• What it means to marry sales, operations, marketing, and AI  
• The relationship with the inside seller
• Changes in ramping and the sales cycle since Covid hit

QUOTES

Getting sales, operations, marketing, and technology right - Kevin: "We try to really get them productive actions each week, each month, and each quarter. That's kind of the internal engine and, of course, the marketing. We're trying to ignite someone to come at us whether it's using that technology, or bots, or what have you." 

Customers still enjoy that relationship with the inside seller - Kevin: "I would say that in its simplest form, the complexity will drive the interaction. But it should return back to the owner inside to dictate and help the customer with their journey."

Find out more about Kevin in the link below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinconnolly222/

Send in a voice message to us: https://anchor.fm/salescommunity/message

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is brought to you by: 

Sales Community | https://www.salescommunity.com/

Dell Technologies | https://www.dell.com/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode of Tech Sales Insights features Kevin Connolly, SVP of the North America Mid-Market at Dell Technologies. Shaping young leaders and medium businesses until they graduate to an enterprise is a fun challenge and a big responsibility at the same time.

Kevin talks about his transition from EMC to Dell and his roles under Dell's Medium Business umbrella. He shares about his experience in managing a young, in-career force, the differences between managing large and small teams, and the dynamics of moving to scale.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Kevin's responsibilities under the Dell umbrella
• The biggest challenge in managing large sales teams vs small teams
• How to create and keep an amazing culture intact

QUOTES

Managing large vs small sales teams - Kevin: "There are a million challenges but when you have scale, one of the golden rules is to try to keep it simple and not overthink it. Especially when you have a lot of solutions to provide and you get excited about that. So I'd say simplicity will rule the day."

On mental health in sales - Kevin: "It is hard but not as hard as I thought it would be. It's amazing if you just shut up and open your ears a bit, young leaders migrating through the sales community would be surprised."

Find out more about Kevin in the link below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinconnolly222/

Send in a voice message to us: https://anchor.fm/salescommunity/message

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is brought to you by: 

Sales Community | https://www.salescommunity.com/

Dell Technologies | https://www.dell.com/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is the last part of our conversation with Jon Festejo, Co-Founder and CEO of Salesbricks. He talks about the many possibilities of CPQ and overall software five or ten years from now. Jon also shares a few of his favorite sales tools to use with Salesbricks to add more efficiency and produce more results.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Possible changes to CPQ five years down
• Why it's CPQ and not CQP
• Other sales tools Jon uses

QUOTES

How software will be trained for the future - Jon: "In software, we'll be doing a better job in figuring out what that right moment is to go upsell your customer. Because in sales, timing is everything. Time also kills all deals and so the software will learn how to go compete and figure out when it is the right time for you to actually visit the customer."

Software will eventually do a better job on its own- Jon: "Today in software sales technology, it's human first and then tools that help them augment and make their jobs a little bit easier. But there's now a tipping point and crossing the chasm where it's going to be technology first and then you apply a human organization to augment that and add additional value."

Find out more about Jon in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-festejo-59233b23/
• Website: https://www.salesbricks.com/

Send in a voice message to us: https://anchor.fm/salescommunity/message

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is sponsored by: 

SaaStr | https://www.saastr.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is the second part of our conversation with Jon Festejo, Co-Founder and CEO of Salesbricks. He talks about the three main aspects to think about in order to secure enterprise transactions, namely transparency, flexibility, and building trust. Jon also shares different insights and analogies when it comes to software sales and being a salesperson in general.

HIGHLIGHTS

• 3 things to consider when leading enterprise sales deals
• Being the Shopify of B2B SaaS companies
• The "If you give a mouse a cookie" analogy

QUOTES

The importance of flexibility - Jon: "What a lot of people don't really understand is, not every deal is going to look exactly the same. Your one million dollar deal, your nine million dollar deal, your fifty thousand dollar deal, there's a lot of permutations and a lot of things that are very different."

Building trust is also about telling the truth - Jon: "There's going to be times in your career and sales cycle where you need to stop pushing customers and say 'you gotta trust me.' That's important, right? To be able to have that painful conversation."

What selling software could look like in 10 years - Jon: "A lot of these industries that invest in technology, focus on customer experience and accessibility, and democratizing the product, those industries, and companies, in particular, are going to win the race. If you see what Netflix did to steaming media and what Expedia did for travel agencies, we want to do the same exact thing for software sales."

Find out more about Jon in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-festejo-59233b23/
• Website: https://www.salesbricks.com/

Send in a voice message to us: https://anchor.fm/salescommunity/message

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is sponsored by: 

SaaStr | https://www.saastr.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode of Tech Sales Insights features Jon Festejo, Co-Founder and CEO of Salesbricks. Creating a user experience where even new sales reps can take the software and effectively build out a strategic workflow is essential. However, not many realize how painful it can be to work with legacy CPQ.

Jon talks about the amount of work that salespeople do especially with CPQ software even if it's supposed to make things easier. He shares about how dealing with CPQ implementation for the fourth time pushed them to start Salesbricks and create a better experience for customers on their software implementation.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Implementing CPQ and the start of Salesbricks
• How Salesbricks creates the ideal experience for sales reps
• CPQ insights from the decision-maker's perspective

QUOTES

The way that CPQs are architected makes them difficult to implement - Jon: "In fact, the CPQ market basically invites a billion-dollar business in consulting. You go hire somebody offshore and spend 6 figures, sometimes even 3x what you spend on the actual software to have somebody implement and maintain it."

Salesbrick's focus on the modern-day buyer - Jon: "When you were going to sell software back in the '90s or 80s, that technology had a long sales cycle, right? Nowadays, if you don't get the attention of a millennial buyer in their 30s or 20s, they're going to move on to go research some other solution. And so we have to go focus on that kind." 

Find out more about Jon in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-festejo-59233b23/
• Website: https://www.salesbricks.com/

Send in a voice message to us: https://anchor.fm/salescommunity/message

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is sponsored by: 

SaaStr | https://www.saastr.com

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is the last part of our conversation with Matt Handler, President and COO of Coralogix. He discusses value selling and how the different departments must be aligned on what your value is to extract it in every part of your messaging. 

Matt also discusses retention and compensation. Coralogix boasts the best in class retention at 150% as they compensate salespeople for the right things, consider upsells and cross-sells as new business, and follow it up with attractive accelerators.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Product, marketing, sales, finance, and HR must know the product’s value intimately well
• Value selling: Constantly check your messaging
• Retention: Compensation drives behavior, so incentivize correctly

QUOTES

Align your messaging so value selling becomes organic - Matt: "Every conversation that we have, the frontline managers, second line managers, CRO, me, we are speaking the same language of ‘Do you understand what the current situation is? The pain? How do they measure that?’ 

‘What's the future stake? What is it that they're looking for and how does that apply to their business? How do we do it? How do we do it better? Who have we done it before?’ And we run those conversations all the time. And around that, did we need the economic buyer. ‘Do we have a champion? Do we understand the decision process?’ All of those things are built-in."

Compensate according to where you want to go as a company - Matt: "Incentivizing the right things, we make it fun. We pay well. I don't pay considerably over market for the initial OTE, I hate that. It's a personal thing for me. I want someone who's hungry to work here. We make sure that the quotas are great, that the territories are great. And then, as soon as you get over your quota, we absolutely crush it with accelerators."

Find out more about Matt and check out Coralogix’s open positions in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthandler/
• Website: https://coralogix.com/

Send in a voice message to us: https://anchor.fm/salescommunity/message

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is the second part of our conversation with Matt Handler, President and COO of Coralogix. He shares their creative ways for lead generation which gets emails opened and creates relationships with prospects immediately over a cold call. Matt also talks about the tools they use that aid their lead generation and the value of authenticity in forging strong relationships.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Creative lead gen gets emails opened and relationship-building over cold calls
• Referrals and getting customers from champions who have left the company
• Give discounts but you must absolutely get a customer referral in return

QUOTES

Get your emails opened with creativity and research - Matt: "Knowing the business, connecting to something in the business value on their 10k or their press releases that resonates with your audience. Know your audience, know the company, do the research. It actually works and you get the opens."

Build a relationship from a cold call through authenticity - Matt: "Be authentic. So if you get someone on a cold call, and Randy you know we're out and you're barbecuing or you're with your family. My team, honestly, says ‘Listen. I know I caught you on a cold call. This is my job. I have something that I think is absolutely germane to you guys. Give me 30 seconds.’ And if you don't like it, one of two things. You can tell me to screw off and we would actually take you off our list. Or, you can say ‘Hey, this is interesting.’"

Find out more about Matt and check out Coralogix’s open positions in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthandler/
• Website: https://coralogix.com/

Send in a voice message to us: https://anchor.fm/salescommunity/message

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is the first part of our conversation with Matt Handler, President and COO of Coralogix. He introduces how Coralogix operates in the observability space and their unique way of organizing "digital exhaust."

He talks about how they help clients migrate from legacy as log data is constantly growing at a rate faster than revenue. Matt discusses how their technology lowers this cost to allow companies to scale.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Coralogix: Analyzing and optimizing "digital exhaust" for observability
• Selling to fast-growing mid-sized companies and PLG for smaller companies
• Market expansion and new products

QUOTES

Go-to-market requires people who execute and operate well - Matt: "You have to screw up enough to get successful and then, honestly, if you can really prove that you can scale and execute, there are a lot of financial-minded folks and that's very much needed in our industry. But people that can execute and operate a business, which Randy was great at, is really important."

Lowering the cost of digital exhaust and allowing companies to scale - Matt: "The key to observability is being able to look across distributed architectures, especially in today's world, and understand where you've got performance issues, or if you have an issue, how do you identify and fix it?"

Starting with two markets and being smart about expansion - Matt: "We're really trying to thread the needle of smart growth with our company but not overgrowing and just trying to throw a bunch of salespeople to drive ARR that aren't really productive. We're all about productivity and optimization."

Find out more about Matt and check out Coralogix’s open positions in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthandler/
• Website: https://coralogix.com/

Send in a voice message to us: https://anchor.fm/salescommunity/message

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is the last part of our conversation with Kelly Breslin Wright, President and COO of Gong, and Founder and Thought leader at Culture Driven Sales. Culture-driven sales recognizes that people are behind every single interaction in business.

Kelly shares what it means to prioritize people in terms of valuing your team and truly understanding the customer journey. She discusses how teams must be aligned in putting the customer first to reduce confusion and build up customers to be successful. 

HIGHLIGHTS

• People build great companies, so companies must prioritize people
• Be authentic with mistakes and own them
• Managing sales and customer success management
• When the going gets tough, companies need to have very tight focus

QUOTES

People are the priority no matter your stage of growth - Kelly: "What are the top 3 priorities? Priority number 1 is people. Priority number 2 is people. And what is priority number 3? It's people, you got it, Randy. Because, you know, it's people who actually build your product and services. It's people who engage with your customers and sell to your customers and support your customers."

Sales and customer success are not mutually exclusive and loop together - Kelly: "Most companies, because they have 1 team that's selling and then another team with customer success, I think that it's really important for us as companies to understand the entire customer journey. So it's not just there's sales that's 1 function and then they go to post-sales because everything is a continual loop."

Find out more about Kelly in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellybreslinwright/
• Website: https://gong.io/

Send in a voice message to us: https://anchor.fm/salescommunity/message

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.