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The sales world often measures one by the stripes they’ve earned. This means to climb the ranks one must perfect smiling and dialing, becoming a closer, and eventually managing up-and-comers.
Revenue Brew asked three sales leaders about the most important lessons from their first sales roles and how they helped them climb to the top of the org chart.
Relationship > Sales
John Schoenstein, CRO at Customer.io, started his sales career at Oracle as a business development rep, a role he said that changed his view of sales relationships. He found that instead of trying to sell, focusing on the needs of potential customers led to successful deals.
“I realized that when you treat customers as partners rather than transactions, you earn trust, you uncover deeper needs that they might have, and you start to create more of a value-oriented conversation, which I found then leads to good outcomes,” Schoenstein said.
Today, Schoenstein encourages his employees to put in the time and work and to practice listening to clients.
Practicing proper prioritization
Early on in Elizabeth Temples’s career, she used to make extensive weekly to-do lists outlining everything she wanted to accomplish. That is until a mentor at an early role told her to drastically scale this practice back.
“She challenged me to identify the three things that would actually move the needle for my business that week and to ruthlessly prioritize them. That simple shift changed how I approached everything,” Temples wrote in an email to Revenue Brew. “To this day, I start each week by identifying my top priorities and end it by asking, ‘Did I move the needle?’ The rest, as she would say, is just noise.”
Now, as group VP of sales at Clari, she explained how prioritization allows her to better orient her team in a way that does not “confuse motion for progress.”
Setting sales boundaries
In sales, time is money, a fact Jeff Kroeger learned quickly in his first sales role at a mom-and-pop shop called Restaurant Select Insurance.
Now, as a division revenue leader at World Insurance Associates, Kroeger creates boundaries to ensure his time is being used as effectively as possible. He will, for example, gauge someone’s seriousness when determining how to allocate his time.
“Understanding when you’re spending your time efficiently is a huge part of it, and knowing when to not pursue something or knowing when to walk away is really important,” Kroeger said. “You want to make sure that the time that you’re spending to serve that client that it’s profitable for you at the end of the day.”
Kroeger found that a good way to establish client relationships was to lay your cards out on the table and ask what it would take for a sales rep to win their business. But also, he was getting smart about what his competition was doing and figured out ways to elbow his way into that business.
“If you feel that you can truly bring value, you need to be talking about that,” he said. “Because ultimately, in our industry, you don’t want to be commoditized.”