SalesTechStar Interview with Chris Nelson, VP, Global Sales and Business Development, HYCU, Inc.

What can sales leaders do differently to drive impact? Chris Nelson, VP, Global Sales and Business Development, HYCU, Inc. weighs in:

_________

Hi Chris, take us through your sales and business development journey through the years and what about your new role at HYCU most interests you?

I have been in customer facing roles my whole life. From the very beginning of my sales career, I was in front of customers carrying a bag. At a very young age, I was promoted into sales and then leadership roles. There has always been one constant: I am always in front of customers. Part of my journey has always been focused on the customer and keeping the customer at the forefront and center of all decisions. That’s how I’ve grown into each and every new role in sales leadership. The customer has always been the beacon and true north. What’s been really interesting, throughout my sales career, and something that I was promoted into my last two roles as CRO prior to HYCU, has been the customer journey was a key part of each role. That was also something that interested me in my new role at HYCU. That, and the differentiation in the product set that HYCU offers.

In data protection and backup and recovery, application resilience is really important. It’s what makes companies and businesses run. HYCU has a massive differentiation from a product point of view. And, the data protection space is ripe for disruption and looking for companies to do it a different way. That was really fun to hear when I was interviewing and speaking to friends and peers in the industry. Also, HYCU is an emerging, early stage company, looking for accelerated growth, additional structure, and leadership to help prioritize sales and business development efforts. These are areas that have always been part of my DNA and what I’ve successfully focused on in the past. Based on where the company is and wants to go, my prior journey and focus, and it was a really interesting match for me.

As a sales leader what are the tactics and strategies you use to keep a healthy sales pipeline and top line revenue?

This goes back to every decision I typically make which is with a customer in mind. So, starting at the customer and working myself back into the company, I used that to understand what needs to be done. It’s important to understand why a company is winning and losing, the customer ideal profile, and how we as a go-to-market organization can keep the customer as the focal point. Some of the tactics and strategies that I like to implement are the following:

1. Understand Your Differentiation and Business Value: We make sure that our teams are enabled to help with differentiation and adding business value to a customer. We do this through the eyes and the ears of technology we offer, and how we solve business problems for our customers. Also, it’s important the team aligns with HYCU’s value.
2. Focus on Enablement: We spend time concentrating quite a bit on our teams being ready and able to talk about our core value proposition and business value outcome for a customer. You need to be able to put this understanding into the competitive landscape and context to really make sure that we help our customer base and our prospects. You also need to understand why what we offer helps with future proofing and what they’re buying just doesn’t solve a problem for today but well into the future as well.
3. Understand Your Technology Fit and Purpose: In terms of technical differentiation, we spend time educating teams on how our technology works but is differentiated from competitors. HYCU is very much a disruptive technology. It’s important to make sure our team’s are ready to go out of the gate. This helps as they focus on pipeline generation and makes sure that not only do we have the right enablement, but we’re always building pipeline and concentrating on what our ideal customer profile is
4. Understand Your Ideal Customer Profile. We spend time focusing in on understanding what the problems in specific vertical markets and industries are within our customer profiles. This helps to make sure we’re selling and prospecting really, really well. It also helps as we build proof points that are important for customers and prospects in specific verticals and industries. Acquiring customers is certainly top of mind. However, we’re also really focused on retaining the right customers and making sure that we have really high customer gross and net retention.
5. Understand Your Core Business Value: We spend time and energy on acquiring new companies. Being disruptive and being able to displace legacy data protection providers is a real financial discussion for us and our teams that we can have at a very high level across businesses, as well as departments, and an entire enterprise. This helps as we focus on a healthy pipeline and also as we focus in on the top line.

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Patrick Finn, VP of Sales at Cloudflare

What in your view are the biggest challenges in B2B technology Sales today?

The number one challenge has and continues to be, you have a limited amount of money to spend. Everybody is fighting over wallet share. This goes back to having a really sound strategy and understanding of where we are winning and where we’re losing. It helps us prioritize spend and focus on the ideal customer profile. It also helps us so that we have a really good understanding of the personas that appreciate the data the most. Ultimately, the buyer’s journey is not always aligned. You need to make sure that you’re adding value, and you’re adding value in a way that you’re providing technology that is a must to have not nice to have. Technology that helps run and protect a business. That ties back to the challenge of focused spending. How do you find discretionary funding? When you understand the spend, you can prioritize your time and effort and align that with a customer’s needs to make sure that some of that money is spent with the highest value return. When you factor all of this into what different companies do at different stages and promises that are made, it’s getting harder and harder as a customer to buy. Helping to differentiate and also help a customer to understand your technology value is extremely important. Also, when you are at a point of displacing another piece of technology, you have to keep in mind what the experience is for the customer and how they’re actually going to do that migration and make it operationally sound. That adds to the spending challenge. A lot of this all comes back to funding and discretionary money, and how you show business value.

What should modern technology sales leaders do differently to drive optimum results in a challenging market?

It goes back to the right focus on the customer. Do not make your problem a customer’s problem. Just because you have an end of month or quarterly goal, or whatever kind of objective you’re trying to drive, companies really need to look at the way that they’re supporting customers differently and the way in which they focus on them and their specific needs. It’s also about the customer’s timing. You need to continue to always build pipeline regardless of the day or time of year. You also need to understand the return on investment that companies are making and to make sure that it’s a true return on investment that is tangible and can be measured. I think that people do sometimes step away from the financial outcome and instead focus on technology speeds, features, and whatever technical highlights it may offer. There are a number of situations where that’s just not good enough. I believe we need to get away from that and focus on customer or prospects timing what the financial outcome is for them.

Can you talk about the salestech and revtech that you’ve relied on to drive sales goals over the years?

Yes, absolutely, this is a big one. There are a lot of technologies between AI and traditional that are really changing the landscape around productivity. I think that there’s only a couple things that we can typically control. Being able to generate higher productivity out of the people we have in a shorter amount of time, technology is really going to help here. We have used and continue to use AI technology around forecasting capabilities. I think there’s also a lot of opportunity around business development efforts that help as well, If you’re doing outreach, there’s no such thing as a cold call anymore. We can really do a lot of homework before we’re engaging. Also, as you’re engaging, you can use AI technology to sift through a lot of different data that’s available, whether it’s voice recordings, emails, or whatever it may be, to really understand the value and benefit and actually streamline productivity. This is incredibly helpful for sales organizations to get to the right areas of focus. It also really helps with customer satisfaction and customer support, and how customer success is engaging with customers as well.

There are a lot of opportunities to capture all of the right details and information and be more proactive than reactive when it comes to supportability and also the productivity of sellers. It’s like a pre sales effort, as well as post sales one, and it helps make the customer success factor a lot better too. So technology that is around forecasting, and that helps like AI technology with outbound outreach, and technologies that can really support the customer success function then those are the important ones I’ve used. All of these types of technologies have a great opportunity that can generate better productivity for sellers and also the sales organization as a whole.

A few myths surrounding salestech and sales?

There’s a lot of overlap between salestech and sales. When it comes to some of the technologies you are using in particular. It also depends on your overall go to market, your customer segment, and how you’re applying some of those technologies. There is no one piece of technology that will solve it all. No silver bullet. It always comes down to the customer data that you’re working with and the overall experience. There are plenty of overlapping technologies. It’s starting to get very busy very quickly. I get a lot of these calls today, myself, and I find myself sifting through what the value proposition of each one may be. A lot of people recognize there’s a lot of opportunity here. But, I think it does vary. I think people need to be careful not to over promise and under deliver on some of these technologies.

If you had to share five key sales fundamentals with our readers before we wrap up, what would they be?

There are a number of key sales fundamentals. My top five would be the following:

Start by Going Back to Basics. There are a lot of fundamentals that are very basic that a lot of people need to make sure they don’t skip over. Some of this can be taken care of by technology. But, many times it’s also the simple things as well. For example, are you using an agenda for meetings? Are you doing proper follow up from a meeting? Are you actively communicating? It’s important, for example, that you communicate well throughout the sales process and that you follow up on requests that a prospect or customer has asked for. There are other basics as well. Things like, being on time, and actually having your technology and demo ready and available at the start of a meeting. I’m also a strong believer in prepping for presentations to make sure you are set up for success. I also believe you need to make sure you do a pre-call and run through a meeting before it actually takes place. These are all basics that are really critical.

Disciplined Activity Drives Pipeline. It can be an easy thing to push aside and not do as daily distractions occur. Other seemingly important priorities or other needs can occur, but you have to really spend the time on the right activity with the right people to drive the right pipeline on a very consistent basis. That takes a lot of discipline. You can easily get to a point and have a great quarter and a great year. The next day, you wake up and you are starting at zero again. That is always a tough thing. The right activity to generate the right pipeline is important.

Balancing Today Versus Tomorrow: I also feel that you need to keep in mind, if you are a recurring business, that you really need to know, the sale today and satisfying a need today. But there is also balancing and understanding that there’s churn on the horizon. If you are not scoping and setting yourself up success on both the customer or prospect side, as well as the company side, there can be a penalty from inefficiencies or waste of productivity. There’s a basic fundamental there of not only handling today’s need, but tomorrow’s need as well.

Partnering for Success: I think that there’s always the opportunity to continue to drive value through partnerships. A lot of best of breed technologies can’t do everything. I think that there’s a strong collaboration point with partnerships, both resellers, global system integrators, regional integrators, as well as, alliance partners that really need to help solve bigger problems for bigger companies and across all different sizes, all different segments of companies. Sometimes people go out and think they can do it all on their own and customers are really looking for best of breed truly, that are integrated and operationally sound and actually can work together. It goes back to another basic fundamental of being easy to do business with.

Always be Recruiting: You always need the right people in the right roles. Good people get promoted and you will always need a great bench of people to step in and fill open roles. Regardless of the success you always need to be recruiting your next talent.

Read More: 10 of the Biggest AI in Sales Myths Busted