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Delve Into The Details To Make Every Sale With Josh McKenty

Deals die in the details…so pay attention

Professional Sales Tips you’ll learn today on The Sales Podcast…

  • Why Josh?

    • Led the first Cloud migration project of the US government as Cloud Architect;

    • Founder/CTO of Piston (acquired)

    • Early Team Lead at Netscape;

    • Team Lead at NASA;

    • Founder of Delving.

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  • Dual citizen: USA and Canada.

  • 2007 at NASA, helping with cloud computing.

  • Started writing software at age six and selling at age seven.

  • He always enjoyed getting in front of customers.

  • Was a sickly child, so he couldn’t do a lot of sports around 1983, and his mom had a computer, so he was able to learn early on.

  • Learned to type and learned to spell at the same time.

  • Sales and Sales Ops see each other as a necessary evil.

  • But Sales Ops needs to know what the play is.

  • “CTC Selling” Change the Conversation.

  • Become a trusted advisor from a product salesperson.

  • Subscription models make you earn your sale every month.

  • Help your customer prove they got value.

  • CTC Selling becomes personal.

  • All business is personal.

  • Help your champion.

  • Application Owner, Business Owner, CIO—ABC.

  • His parents sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door.

  • He did training quarterly when he had a global role.

  • The fundamentals don’t change.

  • Be honest.

  • Drive the details.

  • BANT (Budget, Authority, Needs, Timing), MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion).

Deals die in the details.”

  • Delivery, when, and where?

  • Do you get over-commitment of resources?

  • CRMs end up being dumped into spreadsheets.

  • All of this ERP data goes into spreadsheets.

  • Delving into the data.

  • Data science was big in the work he was doing.

  • None of this was working.

  • They were tracking every touch and using BI tools, but it was hectic and inefficient.

  • The data is always changing.

  • Then COVID and the Suez Canal and the supply chain issue hit.

None of this was working.”

  • The auto industry was hit really hard.

  • Vendors were logging into Ford’s portal.

  • The downside was the cost of stopping the entire production line.

We have a pile of spreadsheets, and we’re trying to make sense of it.”

  • Dates, dollars, details…most sales reps don’t want to talk about.

  • 800 million people use Excel monthly.

  • He’s just pragmatic about it.

  • The spreadsheet is what is passed back and forth.

  • You need a sense of traceability.

  • The board uses it for presentations.

  • It’s not just embarrassing if you get it wrong, but it hurts relationships.

  • He had a great team at Pivotal that wanted to continue working with him.

  • The reason people never dealt with this problem is that it is stupidly hard in a boring way.

  • Comparing two spreadsheets is hard.

  • It’s not like tracking changes in Word.

  • He spent a full year working this out.

  • He did a lot of hard math work to know they had a viable solution.

  • Then they got feedback from customers.

  • He raised money from VCs with whom he had relationships.

  • Don’t leave the boring details to be your customer’s problem.

  • He loves Challenge Selling, but you have to be right and have a track record and be humble about it.

  • He was covering Gap at one point, and they were suffering, and he showed up to a conference sponsored by the CIO. Here’s the QRM (quantitative risk management). You’re losing, and here’s why.

  • Let’s turn your challenge into the plan.

  • There are no magic bullets, but there are bullets.

  • Bill Cook and James Watters at Pivotal.

  • You can’t wait until the of the quarter.

  • Pace of change is key.

  • Paul Maritz was their CEO, and he had a vision.

  • He knew the value the first three customers were receiving.

  • Just rinse and repeat.

  • JP Morgan Chase knew what they wanted to do with Pivotal.

  • His learning loop got faster.

  • Learn from patterns.

  • (Batch your sales calls.)

  • If you have a Monday meeting, check out Delving.

Sales Growth Tools Mentioned In The Sales Podcast

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  • Donate: Just because you like the show, the no-bullshit approach, and don’t want to buy a book, software, or The Make Every Sale Program.

  • The Sales Agenda: take control of every sales opportunity like a pro.

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  • Send Drunk Emails: …that get opened and get you paid!

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GUEST INFO:

  • Guest Site: https://app.delving.com/

  • Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuamckenty/

PODCAST INFO:

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