SalesTechStar Interview with Keith Feingold, Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Onymos

Keith Feingold, Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Onymos shares a few modern-day sales enablement and effectiveness practices in this catch-up:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Keith, tell us more about yourself and your new role at Onymos…what inspired you to foray into Sales?

Thanks for having me. I think everyone has a certain lens they look at things through. Mine is a go-to-market lens – what do we have; how do we message it; how do we package it; who do we sell to; how do we get the best team? Then we can execute. I have been fortunate to do this at different levels from VP of Sales to CEO with a number of companies and have had positive shareholder outcomes. Figuring out that puzzle is what excites me about sales and what excites me about Onymos.

The company is all about helping developers work on high-value efforts and delivering on time. Onymos has had great early success. The chance to build on that success, refine the go-to-market model and see the company grow quickly is rewarding for all of us, and we are doing that every day.

As a sales leader: what are some of the core sales process strategies that you use to drive sales output?

One is I am a huge believer in enablement. Our job as sales leaders is to help folks ramp into their job quickly and everyone benefits when we do that. But enablement must be done at the right time when people can actually remember it and use it.

Secondly, I believe that you need to provide valuable information to the prospects over time and earn the right to engage with them. If there is a WIIFM then you will have better outcomes. We at Onymos are creating content to help in that effort, and it’s paying off.

Thirdly, I am very focused on conversion rates. Whether that be front-end lead to opportunity or back-end opportunity to close or all the steps in between. How well we measure that will tell us where improvements can happen and increase team performance.

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Take us through some of your observations into the changing salestech space and what you feel B2B sales leaders need to do more of to optimize use of their tech stack today.

Social channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., are more important than ever. Customers, especially in this remote work environment, are buried in email. We need to facilitate the establishment of a company and personal brand for our teams to connect with people through. If customers get value from you and trust you, they will engage.

I also think that getting to folks early is key. Many of the intent-based marketing tools are really interesting and can give you hints on what to do.

Of course, data in CRM and tools for outreach are core to any successful sales efforts. Getting the data into those systems easily is key.

How do you see B2B sales teams struggle with sales quota/output in today’s market? What best practices would you share?

Helping prospects visualize what challenges they may see on their journey and how we can help them is key. This can be done with relevant customer stories, so they know they are not alone. Our interactions have to be from a place where we are not selling them on something but helping them meet their personal and professional goals for the job they are in. We are deeply invested in that approach at Onymos.

If you could change five things about B2B sales, what would they be?

More time – on our side and the customer’s side. If we had time to slow down and really think through our decisions/actions, we might have better outcomes but it’s hard sometimes when everyone is moving at a hectic pace.

A way for companies to have the room to evaluate technologies. Most companies are limited in what they can look at because of other operational demands and miss the valuable things they could and should implement.

Ability to freely engage with the decision-makers. It takes a lot to get to the right people.

Smaller committees to make decisions. Many times, there are too many points of view to satisfy to get to a decision and valuable projects don’t happen.

Shorter buying cycles!

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And finally, a few views on salestech as a segment and how you feel this space will shape up over the next few years?

There are so many people creating great tools leveraging AI, ML, and other technologies. The trick is figuring out which ones can really move the dial for your team. Not all these tools integrate well together which is something that needs to be figured out. We see that integration happening with companies being acquired or merged together, which can be good as long as it doesn’t slow the innovation on the component parts. The landscape changes quickly, and we need to bring new ideas to market to meet it and help our teams.