SalesTechStar Interview with Ian Gotts, Founder and CEO at Elements.cloud

Once you understand your customer’s buying culture, optimize your marketing and sales (and salestech!) to align every effort to it advises Ian Gotts, Founder and CEO of Elements.Cloud in this SalesTechStar interview.

Catch the complete story to uncover his tips and insights on Technology Sales and what his journey as a tech entrepreneur has been like:

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Can you tell us a little about yourself Ian. We’d love to know about your serial-tech-entrepreneurial journey so far, especially your biggest learnings and experiences being a start-up founder in the tech/ B2B market!

I’ve always been driven, both at work and outside. I managed to balance a career in Accenture running major transformation programs alongside representing Great Britain in sailing; small high performance boats.  I left Accenture to set up NimbusPartners, a BPM software and services provider. We ran that for 14 years and it was then acquired by TIBCO. After a couple of years I got the 2 Nimbus execs back out of retirement and we founded Elements.cloud…by then I’d moved with the family to San Francisco.  Strangely, the Bay is not suited to my preferred style of sailing, so I now play bass guitar in a rock band that plays dance covers at corporate events  – Jane Blonde and the Goldfingers!

How did the idea for Elements.cloud come about?

We had been a customer of Salesforce for 18 years. We had struggled to manage the implementation lifecycle as there were no enterprise level tools. Over the last 10 years Salesforce has become a powerful platform and now has huge enterprise customers. So we saw a massive opportunity to fill the gap and support their customers. That was a great decision. After 4 years of product and market development we are now seeing explosive growth.

What have been some of your biggest B2B Tech Sales learnings and challenges from the point of view of a tech founder?

1. • Focus. Focus. Focus. Work out what the problem is that you are solving for a customer. Stay focused on that problem set. Build enough to prove that it is a problem that customers are willing to spend money on solving and let them help you drive the tactical product roadmap.
   • Don’t start growing sales and marketing until you are really, really, really sure you have product market fit – not just product marketing fit.
   • Deliver awesome results for your customers so they are happy to evangelize for you…

In Sales today, what are some of the biggest challenges you see sales teams face and how would you advise them to use their salestech stack to create better business outcomes?

1. • Don’t try and solve every possible customer’s problem even if your solution can address it. Narrow it down to a small enough market that you can get some early sales from and those customers will endorse you.
   • More importantly think about your customer’s buying culture. We wrote a book called IMPACT which explores the different buying cultures and how to sell to them. The critical question is, “Is your customer buying an innovative solution that they don’t have budget allocated for  – or are they interested in a solution that they are already planning to buy?” The answer to that question fundamentally changes your sales approach. Download and read IMPACT from -Elements.cloud/impact
   • Once you understand your buying culture, optimize your marketing and sales process and supporting tools.

What SalesTech tools do you wish more Tech Sales/B2B Sales teams would use more of, which SalesTech products or categories of tools do you think will show falling/rising demand over time? 

1. • A single source of truth is key – so a CRM.  But make it easy to populate by sales teams or it won’t be kept up to date. And then automate the hell out of the back end – CPQ, quotes, invoicing. Because of our product focus, we spend every day looking at customers’ screwed up CRM implementations. If the sales people hate it, they don’t use it. We launched a site called OrgConfessions.com where people can post anonymous implementation horror stories and the root cause analysis underlines why we launched Elements.cloud
   • Too many teams do not have a documented and agreed sales process. That makes it impossible to drive continuous improvement or to scale quickly when on-boarding new sales people.

How do you eventually see salestech change how Tech teams sell to their prospects?

1. • Customers have so much better access to information about you, your product and pricing now.  Competitive advantage is now relationship based, customer experience and delivery success matters. Sales is now a team sport where the implementation teams are a key part of that ACV. Sales sets up the long term contract. Implementation drives consumption of the product. I see less selling of “3 year all cost up front” deals.

Given the dynamics in the sales and salestech marketplace today, what are the critical traits that every sales person should now consciously imbibe?

1. • I was told sales is “Be liked. Qualify. Close”.
   • We need to build better trusted relationships with customers. We need to drive more consultative sales  – but only if the product can support that cost. Great sales people learn how to do this over Zoom.
   • A more open trusted relationship and access to data enables us to qualify better.
   • Understanding the customers buying cycle enables us to close. If the ACV cannot support this consultative approach then sales needs to be self-serve, automated which means streamlined and easy. It is polarizing so that there is no middle ground.

Tag (mention/write about) the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read!

1. • Jeff Weiner who built LinkedIn. I’d love to understand his journey and mindset!

Your favorite Sales/SalesTech  quote

1. • Be liked. Qualify. Close.

Tell us about some of the top sales/salestech/other events that you’ll be participating in (as a speaker or guest!) in 2020!

1. • Our big events are Salesforce related. TrailheaDX in June and Dreamforce in the Fall. It will be interesting to see how we attend events in the post-lockdown world. We crave the connection with people, but we can get the content online. We have just launched VirtualEvents.cloud to host events for speakers whose events have been cancelled.

We’d love to know a little about your future plans for Elements.cloud!

1. • We are growing so fast selling to 300,000+ Salesforce customers.  But we have built it so we can support any implementation ecosystem who all have similar issues; ServiceNow, WorkDay, MSDynamics, SAP….  So the future is very bright!