Chief Revenue Officer of Impartner Software, Mark Rogers recently joined us in an episode of The SalesStar Podcast to talk about his best performing sales tactics and strategies while also sharing his thoughts and insights on the evolving sales and salestech landscape.
Catch the complete episode here!
Or Read On To Learn about These 10 Interesting Sales Hacks…from The Conversation!
Always Put the Customers and Partners First!
An underlying principle that has always worked for us and one that drives our company and drives the success of the company is a culture that puts the customer and our partners first, which means that every process that we develop and execute to everything we do starts and ends with the customer. In other words, we put ourselves in the shoes of our clients and watch how we engage with them.
We’ll always ask ourselves, “what if we were those customers working and dealing with ourselves as a partner, would we come back again and buy again”?
This is how we keep a tremendous focus on client satisfaction, on ease of use, ease of doing business, essentially delighting our customers across every touch and every engagement.
Recover Fast, but Adapt Faster!
All it takes is one mistake and you can lose the trust of a customer or a partner or even an employee. We consider our employees to be customers as well.
Therefore, you have to constantly watch yourself. You’re going to make mistakes. But what kind of recovery strategy do you have? All of these matter.
Everything we do also focuses on how we can adopt our processes, our sales motions, our priorities and so forth to that of the client. Again, if we start with the client in terms of everything we do, everything that we develop, every strategy we approach, then we’ll think like they do and that’s what we need!
Who you Build your Sales team with, really matters!
We have what we call a multiplier culture, specifically in my sales organization. We seek out recruits. We incentivize. We train and we recognize those individuals who literally are what we call multipliers.
These multipliers – They know how to replicate their success, their subject matter expertise. The way they engage with customers and gain and secure a trusted adviser status, the way they work with employees and a team-based approach that looks to lift the entire organization as opposed to individually benefiting themselves. You need people like these!
This is something that takes a lot of work and it is very hard to put in place the right kind of recruiting model allows us to find and identify these people. But it’s very much worth the effort and the cost.
Every Salesperson has to have that Added Passion for Work
It isn’t just about sales results with my team. That’s not what I look for alone. I look for those who have passion to go out of their way and do something incredible for their clients, do something highly impactful that literally makes a difference so much so that the client literally wants to hire my sales person!
Sometimes you do lose your good people to others, but that suggests to me that what we’re doing works!
Breed Nurturers and Advisers, not Plain Salespeople!
So the idea of being able to nurture and breed trusted advisers as opposed to good salespeople is really important. They will become rainmakers. My idea is – invest in them and they will invest in us and in the company, because it’s always a two-way street.
Enabling Sales Versus Creating Better Experiences…
What we do focus on always is enabling, empowering and creating an experience that is second to none to drive self-sufficiency and success through our partners, we aim to give them an experience that makes them want to only do business with us as opposed to our competitors.
This is why it’s important for sales teams to be built by their subject matter expertise. If you put generalists out there who have no concept on how to sell a generic SaaS solution, they won’t be successful.
Read More: 8 Video Marketing Tools that Can Help you Boost your Sales Pitch!
Your Customers want you to Think like them
Channel chiefs, channel marketing individuals focus on specifically doing and growing and expanding or scaling business through others. They expect you to understand their pain points. They expect you to understand what keeps them up at night and bring innovation and best practices to their table, solutions that make them rethink the way they do business. That is why the whole trusted adviser model and multiplayer culture works!
Reinvent and Stay Aware!
The best thing to do is to look at the industry. See what other teams and companies follows as part of their best practices. A company that constantly researches its market and constantly looks outward externally to seek new solutions, better approaches, and essentially reinvent themselves is the company that will always be successful.
Evolving Technologies will Change how Technology Sales people Sell
The ability to identify the high impact, high return behaviors that demonstrably lead to results or create results or can be empirically linked to results, whether it’s financial results, whether it’s from an enablement perspective, skills acquiring perspective, whatever it may be that we’re predictable, that’s repeatable for this success that we seek.
This is why sales always have to differentiate themselves and their competitors.
As technologies, especially as martech and salestech evolves, sales will need deeper visibility into their target customer and their target partner.
This is what will help create a tailored experience with the right segmentation, because we all know that no one size fits all!
Do not treat all your customers all the same way!
Sales now needs to listens to their customers, they need to have subject matter expertise to be able to see where the business problems are, maybe even those challenges the customer themselves are not seeing, and then be able to come and show them how that problem is impeding their success and then lead them to maybe what that best solution could be.
Thank you Mark, for a very interesting conversation!
About Mark:
Mark joined Impartner Software when they were serving less than 20 customers, and now four years later, the company has well over 400 customers and is growing and focusing mostly on the larger enterprise space where they have secured partnerships and clients such as McAfee, Honeywell, Facebook, and many other global companies.