On this episode of B2B EQ, we’re joined by a highly accomplished business development and sales professional with a proven track record of success in building and scaling BDR teams in early stage SaaS companies. With over 10 years of experience, he’s brought his talents to roles at Sendoso and UpKeep. This week’s guest is the Head of Sales Development at Cube, Joe Venuti. Host Tim Harris interviews Joe to learn more about how sales leaders need to be managing their teams, and what steps they can take to be better leaders.
Takeaways:
- With potentially worrying economic futures and lots of layoffs, it’s a stressful time to sell. As a leader, you need to be empathetic to the challenges your reps are facing to ensure they feel supported.
- While communication tools like slack or zoom are incredibly valuable in the remote and hybrid workplace, they are impersonal. A slack message doesn’t have the same effect as walking across the sales floor and congratulating a rep on their accomplishments.
- 1 on 1’s need to be more than just quota reviews. Leaders should spend the first section of these meetings building a genuine connection with their reps. Leaders need to both ask about rep’s personal lives, but also open up to share about themselves.
- As a sales rep, you need to understand how much buying power the person on the call has. Regardless of their title, very few people at a company have the power to be the single decision maker for new buys.
- As a seller, you need to go beyond just the features of your product. Selling with empathy means sitting down with your buyers to learn what resonates with them, what keeps them up at night, and then working to address those.
- The sales landscape has gotten more and more noisy, and everyone's competing for time. To cut through the noise, you need to be different, and personalized to clients, otherwise, you’re just another face in the crowd.
- While personalized outreach is important, it only works if it is accurate and relevant. You may be tempted to sprinkle in details about a buyer's hobbies or likes, but inaccurate details create a strong deterrent in the buyer's mind.
Quote of the Show:
- “It comes down to actually caring about the human beings you work with.” - Joe Venuti
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