In his latest episode of Scaling Success, Sean Cantwell invites Paul Melchiorre to discuss the art and science of sales.
How do you build and scale a successful sales organization? Who do you hire? What separates the good from the great in sales? To help answer these questions, Paul Melchiorre brings 30-years of experience in enterprise software sales and business leadership to the podcast table. Paul’s experience traces back to the early days of Ariba, leading to senior leadership roles at SAP, iPipeline, and most recently, Anaplan. Recently, Paul published a new book, Selling the Cloud A Playbook for Success in Cloud Software and Enterprise Sales.
SCALING SUCCESS EPISODE 02: PODCAST
Scaling success episode 02: VIDEO
Scaling Success Episode 02: Highlights
Key Highlights from Paul:
- Enterprise selling has fundamentally changed. The buyers are so much smarter today. They have access to more information and are more familiar the industry than your sales people are. They’ve been doing this for 20 or 30 years as buyers. You’ve got to do a lot more homework in enterprise sales. Now, before you meet your prospects.
A lot of sales folks get into a transaction mindset. “I’ve got a quota. I’ve got to hit my quota or I’m going to get fired.” With this mindset, they take a very short term, transactional view of the profession. And that’s where trust gets eroded very quickly. Customers can sense that, and they feel it. If you care about your customer, you build that trusted relationship, and that relationship sticks whether you sell them in this particular transaction or not.
When it comes to scaling, this is a mistake I see all the time: Attempting to scale the sales organization without understanding segmentation. For example, how are they going to manage their territories? How are they going to manage compensation structures? How are they going to train new hires? What kind of support infrastructure am I going to put in place? And, most importantly, is the product really ready for all this additional potential business?
A mistake I see a lot of early stage companies make is hiring a CRO. At that stage you really don’t need a CRO. You need somebody to really build out the sales organization. They must have a certain skill set. They roll up their sleeves and get stuff done right.
- Don’t underestimate the power of positive thinking in a Sales organization. It’s always positive in front of the sales team. It’s always motivating. It’s always the glass is more than half full.
Watch or listen to the full episode for more!
