Working in sales isn’t easy. Reps have to deal with rejection and heartbreaking setbacks on a daily basis.
Luckily, there’s a key to making the hustle a bit easier: Having a firm belief in the product you’re selling. When reps have truly bought into the services and tech they’re pitching, it’s not unusual for their day-to-day to look more exciting. It becomes less about convincing a prospect of something, and more about showing them a tool that could drastically improve their worklife.
Built In Austin recently connected with nine local sales professionals who genuinely believe in the products they sell. They filled us in on the skills they’ve needed to gain to be successful, the impact their products have on their respective industries and why their current sales role is their most rewarding yet.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
At CrowdStrike, our mission is to stop breaches. Being able to pitch a suite of solutions that are aligned with virtually every company’s security needs makes me much more effective at executing our mission. It is rare that I don’t find alignment to solve the challenges expressed by my clients. CrowdStrike demonstrates a level of customer focus that is rare in any industry.
CrowdStrike excels at aligning new product and service capabilities to what our clients are asking for, and delivering them quickly and efficiently via our cloud-native architecture. This allows us to remain agile and scalable as we grow our platform exponentially. Instead of growing exclusively by acquisition, we have developed the bulk of our portfolio in house. We are always adding new capabilities to our single-sensor platform, and are building a team of world-class talent to provide a level of quality we can control and guarantee.
The product delivered to our customers is exceptional and aligns with our key area of value: increasing security efficacy without business disruption.
It is rare that I don’t find alignment to solve the challenges expressed by my clients.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
First and foremost, anyone that is interested in selling for CrowdStrike should have a genuine interest in solving the challenges our clients face. This requires intentionality, persistence and thoughtful questions to uncover the right solutions. It’s also important that people are passionate about the mission we are working towards together — stopping breaches. Lastly, engagement and responsiveness are critical skills at CrowdStrike.
The experience you give a prospective client during a pre-sales evaluation will reflect on the company’s approach to customer care. Going above and beyond to exceed client expectations from day one will set you apart in a convoluted industry filled with buzzwords, marketing jargon and empty promises.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
Epicor is a global leader in enterprise resource planning for medium-sized businesses, and our company’s evergreen market demand, premier customer service, and ongoing commitment to product innovation ensures Epicor solutions are a sales slam dunk.
First, what sets Epicor ERP solutions apart from other competitors is our overall dedication to the markets we serve – our customers are the hard-working businesses that make, move, and sell the things we all need, and we are passionate about working with them to curate solutions that fit their evolving needs. The makers, movers and sellers who support the global economy will always have a need for visibility into the supply chain, and with ongoing disruptions as well as mounting pressure for digital transformation, customer demand for cloud products is — and will remain — strong.
With this in mind, Epicor continuously evolves as a company through product innovation and industry acquisitions to provide its customers with top-tier products solving emerging industry challenges.
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
We sell digital transformation to our customers daily. With the onset of Covid-19 and the general trend toward process automatization, we push for a cloud-first mentality for our salespeople. However, we ask they stay true to our customer-first mentality and remain understanding if a customer is not ready. Epicor sales reps should also be able to think like our essential customers and adapt to meet our customers where they are at in all aspects.
At Epicor, we have a strong “develop and promote” culture that begins with folks early in their career coming as business development reps, and continues all the way through their entire sales journey. It’s one of the reasons Epicor has a 10-year average tenure among its sales organization, which I believe is unheard of in the software industry.
It’s clear that our top-performing people have truly mastered differentiating themselves by not only developing deep vertical expertise before meeting with potential customers —whether in person or virtually — but also by building trust through letting their true personalities show.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
The best part about being at Khoros is how relevant the platform is in today’s digital world. Customer experience has become the new battleground for brands, and most executives are prioritizing improvements in how their companies interact with customers.
Managing this experience is difficult because consumers have many channels they can use to connect with a brand, like social media, review sites, phones and your online community, and each department uses disparate tools and processes. This leaves consumers with a disjointed and frustrating experience. Luckily, Khoros has the technology to help brands combat this with a cohesive solution that brings together all customer interactions across channels into one easy-to-use and scalable platform.
Customer experience has become the new battleground for brands.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
Khoros fosters a culture of hiring talented people, then setting them up for success through excellent training and situational coaching. We build our team by promoting from within, so individual and team performance is always recognized.
The most important qualities for sellers at Khoros are no different than any other enterprise software: We need to be genuinely curious about how to help our customers, and find ways to deliver them a business outcome. If we keep this top of mind, everything else always seems to follow.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
Udemy Business is a great product to pitch because many companies want to further invest in their employees’ education in technical and soft skills. We have created a one-stop shop to help with retention and upskilling for companies of all fields to achieve their business outcomes. Combining our courses with the data and analytics we provide, the product speaks for itself.
It’s essential to actively listen and fully understand your customer’s pain points and how you can best address them.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
When selling Udemy Business and our suite of learning solutions, developing a strong sense of research will help with position personas, which allow you to pitch exactly what they need. You can also help the customer feel confident in the product by being concise on the phone. Finally, it’s essential to actively listen and fully understand your customer’s pain points and how you can best address them.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
Our product brings new levels of transparency to construction. Combining simple-to-use, 360 degree cameras, computer vision and artificial intelligence, we make it incredibly easy for customers to capture a complete visual record of a jobsite. This allows contractors to create their own digital twins of their project and progress while simultaneously collecting data for future use, simply walking around with a 360 degree camera.
It’s an exciting product to pitch to prospects due to the astronomical value it provides, backed by virtually endless use cases. Our technology is used on over 20,000 job sites to date, and this is just the beginning. It is a very exciting time to get aboard this rocketship!
It is an added blessing to work for a company that is from the industry and helped pioneer this 360 degree photo movement. For years, the industry has used two dimensional photos and no automation, which can be tedious and time consuming. Thus, presenting prospects with an automated solution that captures more information in a fraction of the time is a really fun pitch.
Genuine consideration and care for the prospect’s interests is crucial to success.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
As with any sales role, genuine consideration and care for the prospect’s interests is crucial to success. Getting to know potential clients, understanding the intricacies of their business and identifying how we can add value for them is pivotal to effectively selling our products.
Confidence, grit, active listening, rapport building and an entrepreneurial spirit are all critical skills for successful salespeople at StructionSite. Beyond that, it is important for new team members to become acquainted with our products, understand how they are used, the “why” behind using them and what is on the horizon for the products themselves. Obtaining this level of expertise will unveil just how state of the art our technology really is. Once you understand that, you will have the confidence necessary to go out there and sell with conviction, because you are 100 percent committed to the product you are selling.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
Because we’re an organization that’s more than 20 years old, we have an established product-market fit and a globally trusted brand. When speaking with clients, they know who we are and the problems that our solutions are proven to solve. Our products are in demand by a variety of verticals and organization sizes: 91 percent of the Fortune 100 have a Redgate footprint, and we have over 800,000 active users.
Furthermore, the concepts we discuss are clearly embedded within practices that our prospects undertake on a daily basis. Companies invest significantly in our solutions to ensure they’re getting their software out to market faster and more reliably than their competitors. This is because the health of the database estate is essential to the performance of our customers’ mission-critical software and applications.
We don’t sit back on our laurels as a software company, either. Some of our products have been around for over a decade and have become the industry standard. Others were launched only recently to keep up with changes in technology or the way that companies use technology to collect, use and protect their data. As a rep, this gives you the opportunity to deliver a pitch with a genuine belief that we can help the customer across their database platforms.
We’re in this for the long haul and we genuinely like to help customers achieve their goals.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
The three most important skills for selling our solutions are intellectual curiosity, a growth mindset and active listening.
The solutions we sell are technical, and the clients we work with have extensive knowledge outside of our realm. Intellectual curiosity is important because we need to demonstrate a real interest in what they’re trying to achieve, along with an understanding of how we can help them to achieve it. Active listening is crucial, as there are key bits of information within client calls that dictate the direction of the call. If we miss that information, we can take the conversation in the wrong direction.
We look for a growth mindset and the ability to see challenges as opportunities rather than roadblocks. We don’t look for one-off deals — we’re in this for the long haul and we genuinely like to help customers achieve their goals.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
In the new hybrid world of work, organizations of all sizes are looking for better ways to connect and engage with their employees. Remote work isn’t going away, which fundamentally changes how organizations think about their employee engagement strategies.
As a remote employee, LumApps is my digital HQ. Besides email and chat, not many applications have the ability to touch every employee, but the “intranet” can. This piece of technology is strategically placed to be the digital home for employees, but most of these homes are in dire need of a remodel. We help our customers reimagine the intranet and the value it can have, transforming these technologies into employee experience platforms.
There’s a better way to engage employees in this new world of work and we have a great story to share.
The ability to listen is an overlooked skill.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
The ability to listen is an overlooked skill. As my mother used to say, “You have two ears and one mouth for a reason.”
We sell an enterprise platform that touches everyone within an organization. Corporate communications, HR and IT are involved in buying decisions, and each of these groups will have different needs. Sometimes these needs are aligned and sometimes they aren’t. As a LumApps sales person, it’s our job to listen to each of these stakeholders’ perspectives and help organizations find alignment across all cross-functional teams.
Listening allows you to be consultative, which is an important skill for any product or service you’re selling.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
Billd is positioned incredibly well within our industry. The best part about our service is that it legitimately helps our customers do their day-to-day jobs, and grow their business in ways that have never been done before. We are selling in an industry that has been historically against subcontractors and we are empowering them to take their power back. We are selling something that they have never used before — our service is brand new to these subcontractors.
Most of the subcontractors we target have experienced issues in cash flow at least once while operating their business, so it is on us at Billd to shed light and identify this pain point to our customers. It is our job to position Billd in a way that helps our customers do the best work of their lives and make it seamless along the way. It is easy to sell a product when you know it allows your customer to grow their business and leave a legacy at the same time.
It is easy to sell a product when you know it allows your customer to grow their business and leave a legacy at the same time.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
The skill that will make any sales professional successful in marketing our service is grit. Grit, to me, is the ability to come in every day and put in the work to understand our customers, the industry and the struggles subcontractors face. The construction industry is notorious for being slow to change, and we are a service that is disrupting that status quo. Grit is the ability to face that initial rejection but have the knowledge of the industry to rebut, helping subcontractors understand the value Billd can add to their business.
Putting yourself in the shoes of a subcontractor is vital to our success. Once you develop the understanding that subcontractors are the foundation of building America, you begin to realize just how powerful Billd’s financing tools can be to the success of a subcontractor’s business. When you come into work each day with this mindset, you can find not only success but reward as you help another small business grow.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
The value of our solution can vary based on who we are engaging with across a marketing organization. My objectives are to learn what goals or roadblocks my client is facing and then provide trackable solutions that help them. My TrustRadius team has done a wonderful job of listening to client feedback to consistently improve our value to clients.
Being genuinely curious is important, as it leads to providing solutions that are more tailored to the client’s needs.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
Having a background or understanding of marketing orgs is very helpful. It is also helpful to have a history of SaaS and experience selling to large companies. I also believe that being genuinely curious is important, as it leads to providing solutions that are more tailored to the client’s needs.
