Tech Sales Insights

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is the second part of our conversation with Kelly Breslin Wright, President and COO of Gong, and Founder and Thought leader at Culture Driven Sales. At the heart of culture-driven sales is people. This challenges the idea of a sales-driven culture where operating principles are the priority. 

A strong people-first approach gets you the best talent and creates a positive work environment, which ultimately drives toward more and better sales. This means that companies must be very firm with hiring based on behaviors that align with the culture that they are trying to create within their organization.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Culture-driven sales has a common mission and challenges conventions
• On hiring: Determine the right behavior traits that align with your culture
• Feedback and managing your culture with care and intention  

QUOTES

Attract top talent with a strong mission - Kelly: "It's culture-driven sales. If you have a strong mission, strong culture, strong operating principles, strong people-first approach, then you're going to be able to get the best people and help to provide an environment where it's a positive place to work where you can get the most out of those people because they're empowered and then that in turn will drive more sales."

Be intentional in determining behavioral fit during the interview process - Kelly: "Mission is really important to make sure the whole company understands the purpose and their why. This is a really important way to determine who wants to work for you, who [does] not. Are they passionate about that why? Do they care? So that's the first.” 

"The second is making sure that we're asking the right questions in the interview process that are teasing out not only experience and resume, but also how they align with the right behavioral traits that are core to your culture and your operating principle."

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

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This episode of Tech Sales Insights features Kelly Breslin Wright, President and COO of Gong, as well as Founder and Thought leader at Culture Driven Sales. Seeing a comprehensive view of a salesperson’s reality and taking insights from that is a powerful way to unlock their full potential. 

Kelly shares how Gong takes a holistic approach to data and uses AI to glean insights into customer conversations. This has sweeping advantages for salespeople and many other departments which have a stake in understanding what is going on with customer conversations and getting prescriptive guidance on what to do next.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Selling books door to door: Kelly's journey in sales and entrepreneurship
• Gong offers a holistic approach to data and insights to create effective sellers
• Providing salespeople with actionable insights on what to do next

QUOTES

Grit and resilience are necessary to be successful - Kelly: "So much of being successful in sales and successful in business, it's about grit and learning how to put hard work in, learning how to get knocked down and how you stand back up and you keep on going. Learning how to persevere. And there is no job in the world that is harder than selling something door-to-door because you're sized up in 15 to 30 seconds."

A holistic approach that makes people work more effectively - Kelly: "We capture all of this data and then we're able to provide a lot of diagnosing and understanding of what's happening with that reality so that we can help improve coaching, onboarding of your teams, help to understand what's going on with your competitors, understand what people are saying about your products so all different groups—marketing, sales, CS, product—who are interested in knowing what's going on in our customers conversations, can get that learning from Gong."

Gong takes data from different work streams to produce holistic insights - Kelly: "If you only get a slice of the data, it's only going to tell you a slice of the story. So, first, you have to have a comprehensive view of what's going on with the data, and that's really been Gong's approach. We're going to be much more comprehensive of creating this foundational platform."

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

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This episode of Tech Sales Insights features Chris Bowen, Senior Vice President for Sales at Hammerspace. Sales and marketing are essential pillars in any business and Chris discusses how these 2 departments align to ensure that their messaging is synced. He also discusses the central role of enablement to ensure that the sales team is always focusing on the problems they solve rather than the technology and features which do not contribute to value-selling.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Aligning sales and marketing to the problems they solve
• Value-selling: It's not about the tech, it's about the use cases they solve
• Sales leaders to look up to and advice from mentors

QUOTES

Customer success today and moving forward - Chris: "Most of it's more on implementation to make sure that we're getting customers that have gone through the POC stage, getting them implemented into production, and then make sure they're happy. So that's something that we'll also start to grow as we move into early 2023."

Build your network and keep learning - Chris: "It's really about building relationships. I mean, at the end of the day, whether it's relationships internally or externally with customers, those last a lifetime. Whether it's this company or 10 years from now."

Tips for new sellers to be a great salesperon - Chris: "You should have, at any point, when you're 6 to 8 months into your new sales job, you should have 16 to 20 opportunities and 4 to 6 of those should be at various points of the POC stage. And you should be touching 5 partners a week and even 5 customers a week."

Find out more about Chris in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bowenca/
• Website: https://hammerspace.com/

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

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This episode of Tech Sales Insights features Chris Bowen, Senior Vice President for Sales at Hammerspace. Nailing down product-market fit is one of the biggest challenges for any startup and Chris shares how they figured out theirs. He also speaks on how they hired their sales team based on a builder mentality and their ability to sell a vision. He discusses their 4 pillars namely sales, partnering, technology, and marketing.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Product-market fit and hiring a sales team with a builder mentality
• Partners and alliances accelerate growth
• Focusing on big deals and customer acquisition compensation

QUOTES

Figure out product-market fit with these questions - Chris: "Do you have multiple sites? Are you where are you at in your journey to cloud? Do you have multiple types of storage or tiers of storage? Do you have a workflow that you're trying to share across multiple sites? If they answered 2 of those questions, that's a potentially very good fit for Hammerspace."  

Spending time on the biggest deals and sales enablement - Chris: "I'm always looking at where the deals for the quarter are. We have a top 10 deal list that I tend to focus on. Most of them are the bigger deals for the quarter. I keep an eye on obviously for next quarter and where we are for the year. And then a lot of it's with the sales folks, enablement, and then really how do I drive partners and technology."

Find out more about Chris in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bowenca/
• Website: https://hammerspace.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 features Chris Bowen, Senior Vice President for Sales at Hammerspace. Today he shares his professional growth, from working in sales straight out of college to ultimately joining Hammerspace. He gives an overview of what it means to build a startup sales organization from the ground up, solve the most pressing issues of storage and product-market fit, and focus sales on the media, entertainment, and gaming verticals.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Building a startup sales org: ICP, culture, and solving product-market fit
• A go-to-market plan that focuses on media entertainment and gaming
• Hiring sellers with strong networks in media and entertainment 

QUOTES

Solving the storage issue so sellers can focus on selling - Chris: "I would say to a recruit is one, we solved the holy grail of storage. How many times have you gone into a customer and they said, “Yeah, what if, it'd be great if you could do this?’ So we've been hiring folks that have been selling to customers and listening to customers ask this question, this global file system that connects data around the world."

Hammerspace focused on hiring sellers with established networks - Chris: "We went and hired folks that had experience and a very strong network in media and entertainment so they can go to their customer base. We had to build content. We had customers that were willing to talk about us publicly. So that's been very successful."

Find out more about Chris in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bowenca/
• Website: https://hammerspace.com/

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

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This episode of Tech Sales Insights features Roger Sands, CEO of Wyebot. A high-powered team is behind the past and future successes of Wyebot. Roger shares how they create and retain these top performers and their focus on nurturing team members who share common values. He also provides his own sales prediction where sellers must return to some form of face-to-face interaction while also balancing the advantages of video selling to create successful partnerships.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Creating and retaining a high-powered team
• Build relationships with your team and customers to create conversations
• Sales leaders to emulate
• Predicting a return to face-to-face sales optimized by video conferencing

QUOTES

Create a high-powered team by listening to internal referrals - Roger: "Listen because they're going to have great ideas on how to solve the next challenge in scaling. Who to hire? They'll have contacts in the industry and the best hires are references, in most cases. Over half, I think, of the folks that we've hired in sales in the last 18 months came from internal referrals. So it's building this culture of wanting to do something special."

Balance the return to face-to-face with video sales - Roger: "I think the key thing here for not only Wyebot but for CEOs and sales leaders around the globe is the balance. How do we balance the leveraging, the technology because, of course, if you're always traveling continuously, there's a lot of time spent on that. The travel time, the expense associated with it. So there's a balance here where I don't think it makes sense to be travelling everywhere all the time, but also relying on video conferencing all the time is not the right solution either."

Find out more about Roger and explore their open sales positions in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roger-sands-4142673/
• Website: https://wyebot.com/

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

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This episode of Tech Sales Insights features Roger Sands, CEO of Wyebot. He talks about Wyebot's early preference for direct as they were creating a new market segment and building a large customer base. Moving forward, Wyebot is shifting toward channels. Roger also emphasizes the need to be selective with technology partners, ensuring they understand the value they provide, and communicating that on sales calls.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Leaning on direct when creating Wyebot's new market segment and shifting to channel
• Wyebot's value message: ROI of mean time to resolution
• Be selective with technology partners

QUOTES

Selling direct and channel is comp-neutral - Roger: "If we've been in the channel long time and if you want the channel to be effective, you cannot compete with them, you can't take deals away from obviously, so we comp the sales team the same way."

Wyebot's value message to prospects - Roger: You're talking to a CIO, they have business-critical networks and they need to have those uptime has to be 99.9% in most environments. We're not talking to stock exchange inflations where it's even higher, but we're talking high availability. Our value at Wyebot is we ensure they have high availability, and high availability is the ROI."

Find out more about Roger and explore their open sales positions in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roger-sands-4142673/
• Website: https://wyebot.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 features Roger Sands, CEO of Wyebot. He discusses how their company optimizes business-critical wireless networks using AI. Wyebot has taken what used to be a manual process and automatically identifies performance issues and provides actionable items to solve them. They are in a fast-growing segment offering a gamechanger product that helps scale businesses to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

HIGHLIGHTS

• Roger's career and starting Wyebot with a focus on automation
• Education, healthcare, and manufacturing are Wyebot's 3 core verticals 
• Doubling the sales team and offering unique opportunities in the market-creating segment
• 3-year plan: Scale to hundreds of millions of dollars and accelerate with channel partners 

QUOTES

Wyebot automates business-critical networks using AI - Roger: "We started Wyebot with a whole focus on automation, so we're changing the game here, Randy, in IT automation where we're taking what has been a traditional, manual, reactive type solving performance issues on these business-critical networks, and we've automating it with AI technology."

How technology partners help you scale to hundreds of millions of dollars - Roger: "When you're a smaller company and scaling and you want to get to hundreds of millions of dollars and beyond, then the technology partner can be a huge asset. Huge asset. And there's different types, as you asked, different types of technology partnerships. You can do all the way to an OEM where you're literally licensing and rebranding your solution into the market. And then on a real light side, you can do reference selling."

Find out more about Roger and explore their open sales positions in the links below:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roger-sands-4142673/
• Website: https://wyebot.com/

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

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This episode is sponsored by OpenSymmetry, our Plan-Deploy-Manage Sales Compensation Technology sponsor. OpenSymmetry provides best practice advice and considerations when assessing, deploying, and managing Sales Performance Management technologies.

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

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This episode is sponsored by our two Up & Coming Sponsors salesbricks and Spotlight.ai.

Salesbricks , our CPQ sponsor, is a better way to manage quote-to-cash for your enterprise, inside-sales, and self-service go-to-market motions.

Spotlight.ai, our Value Intelligence sponsor, provides a Value Intelligence AI driven platform to transform sales discovery, auto build differentiated business cases and optimize value positioning for field and remote teams.

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

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