YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Fiechtner

lines on the record: 70
first: 2024-08-02
most recent: 2024-08-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Are always unnatural things that happen. I think a good reason for me is we try to pull it forward from the next quarter. We couldn't get through all of the required steps. And so it actually should have stayed in Q2 instead of Q1. That's my favorite reason. I think stuff happens right in sales. It's the one profession that you can try to control everything, but shit still hits the fan from time to time. So you try to control as much as you can. I can't say there's ever a good slip deal reason. I think some are just less bad.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the first week of the quarter, typically, I'm looking up the slip deal reviews. So one, you're looking at slip deals, everything that happens. A, because that's the easiest way to the path to commit. Those were deals that were supposed to happen. That's not me beating up people. That's me just doing more homework to find out where can I share up the number.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think three things. One, how do you drive the most simplistic process? I tell people all the time, salespeople aren't lazy. They just are wired to find the quickest path from point A to point B. So you have to make it super simple, super straightforward. I think the second and third thing that I've learned a lot about being in my seat now is the process really matters. So there's a lot of forecast calls and I get to meet with a lot of CROs and I'm fortunate enough in that situation. Like forecast calls you listen to and they're like, hey, this deal's still good. And we're like, yep, that's their forecast call versus I think where we looked at this at UiPath and then again at Clary was how do”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny, so most of the CFOs I talk to are like we're spending the same, we're just spending it on different things, and I think that one that means there's enterprise tech consolidation. So they're trying to say, hey, I can do as much with one platform as much as humanly possible. I don't need 12 best of breed products. Two, I think you're seeing folks dabble, obviously, with Gen AI. And we got to mention it 10 times on every podcast we're on, right? But you're seeing people shift money there and spend more money there. And that does get exceptionally expensive in certain spots. But I don't think folks are buying less. I think they're just buying differently. And from what I've seen, it's been more platform-based approach. And it's been more platforms that have proven success rather than just the shiny object. So if you can show material improvement on an ROI of bottom line, you know, constriction, top line growth, whatever it may be, folks are interested. But if you're just there because you're a shiny object, yeah, you're getting cut.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the deferring payment terms for a terrible long time because someone is in a tight cash position usually ends poorly. You got to make those bets really, really intelligently. And I've done that and I know people have been strapped and you felt for the customer and you've wanted to put them in place to continue them as a client. But those ones are really, really careful and I would tread lightly on that. I think you're seeing cash becoming exceptionally more important, especially with interest rates as high as they are. So people are tightening those windows. And it's somewhat becoming standard across the board. So there's less give and take there.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think when I was a seller, I think I did this with trying to fourth wall folks from the human element of you know I'm a salesperson, you know it's my job and you know that like which is great about my current job like I sell the sellers So it's super easy for me to say to the CRO like you've been in my shoes You know I got to talk to the CFO as well and I got to make sure that I understand his or her constraints to figure this out I think I did the same thing as a salesperson a lot of times was just trying to make it a human element if you come off in full salesperson cheese and say, Harry, I really make up some bullshit reason as to why you need to get to so-and-so, they're going to smell right through it. And honestly, authenticity is the one thing that matters there. So I think what I always did was like, candidly, I'm a salesperson and you know it's my job to triangulate on this so I don't waste my team's time and I don't waste your team's time. Can I have an introduction to X, Y, or Z? Nine times out of 10, it worked.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think beyond the traditional let's drive a compelling event, right, of working backwards and figuring out something that's going to solve for them uniquely that's a burning platform issue. That's obviously the most consistent and easy one. I think the other thing is finding the personal win, right? So for your champion, your buyer, the economic buyer, hopefully you're figuring out what the win is for them and helping them be it relationship building, be it storytelling, be whatever it is, like getting in the boat with them. I find a lot of times like and not asking for personal favors or those types of things, but if someone feels connected to you and connected to the product and feels connected to the success of the project, they're going to push to get it done urgently as well, which has been the probably the thing that I would use most successfully out of the traditional things we've done.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot depends on the maturity of your sales team. You have to have guidelines in place just for safeguards and governance to not do anything silly. But I truly do, and I've told my sellers at the last three companies I've been to is like, you own pricing. If you come to me and help explain why this is important for the client success and why it's going to make them successful within staying with reasonable guide rails, we're going to give you the pricing you need. I think that's ever true now where we look at macroeconomic environment, SAS going in the tank. Like we got to be focused on adoption and long-term success. And there are times when people talk about creative deal construction, like, yeah, we've done crazy ramps to get people off the ground because they were tight, but we knew it was going to be a long-term contract and was going to help them. We've done unnatural things if we know enough and the client is willing to share what their constraints are, we can always find a way to solve it.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without giving too many secrets about how to negotiate with Clary on the most popular sales podcast, I think the thing that we care the most about, of course, is number of users. So the bigger the population, the better the price you're going to get. And that is true for every named user company. Same thing on consumption, the more you're going to commit to, the better bright you're going to get. Next for us is service start date. So how quickly can you get them? SaaS companies can't recognize that until they actually activate users, meaning if you're going to activate six months from now, I'm not taking it until Q4. Q2 deals are worth a lot more money to me in that sense. And the third thing is like length of the contract. Fourth thing is always probably terms and conditions of simple things, payment terms, whatever it may be, and creativity around T's and C's.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that the way that I've always done it is, and it depends on if it's a named user model or a consumption model, of course, but looking at it, how do you want to buy? I'm not going to force you on how many users, how many of those things, like let's just understand your deployment schedule, what you want to do and work backwards from there. So once you've mapped out the deployment schedule of, call it the business as usual for when users need to be live based on the value that you're going to expect or kind of the business impact against the complexity to implement, lay that model out and you're working together, discovering that as they go. The second piece of that then is look as we look at this here's my levers is how I've always negotiated. So usually server start date, commercial terms, length of contract, those things are the biggest levers for traditional SaaS companies. I'm going to tell you about those immediately. Where do you have flexibility? And then we kind of bury the two. But a lot of it is understanding what they're trying to achieve and then understanding what levers you have internally and just marrying them together.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know who taught me this, and I think a lot of great mentors probably at Salesforce that lean into this. One of my first great bosses for a long, long time, Eric Eigensider's, where he was like, you own pricing. Like, no, I don't. Like I have to go through all the approvals. I have to ask for this person and this person to approve. You ultimately get to prove it. He's like, no, you own pricing. So what was ingrained to me early on was my job as a seller is to understand the client's constraints as it relates to their OpEx, CapEx, cash flow, whatever it may be in the constraints that they have, which often is tough to figure out because sometimes it's, yes, the buyer knows it, but sometimes the procurement knows it. More often than not, it's a finance person that you never talk to. But if you can figure out through options and through the right questions.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a unique way to solve the problems I have. Like, we're not in an era anymore of just buying tech for tech's sake. So that's what I think about that when you're talking about how do you bring people to the table? Yes, you ask a ton of questions. You do all the right things. But most importantly, before that to know someone, you do your homework, right? And show up with an executive point of view, if you will.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two things on this. One, the majority of organizations I've been a part of have been on the maturity cycle where a lot of tech companies become as product sellers. They talk about me, me, me, me. Here's all the great features and functions. Here's the bits and bytes. I think the first thing in terms of like, not that you're convincing someone to see their point of view, you're showing up with an opinion, right? It's the same thing as if I go to my boss, I can't say, hey, I have a problem, right? It's more, I have a problem and here's an idea I have to fix it, right? And the same way when you're talking to a client, I think what we teach a lot of our sellers is really study their business. It's the easiest thing that you can do. And if you show up with a strong opinion of, hey, I've talked to your team both qualitative, quantitative research that says, here's my perspective on where you should be going. And here's how I uniquely help you get there. You may not always win, but you have a disproportional chance that you're going to actually have a seat at the table to help that person solve their business. And candidly, like, I don't want to buy and I buy enough software from people that don't know my business inside and out and don't.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somebody to see my point of view one and then two, like win was super, super fun for me and like the thrill of the adrenaline, the hunt that like I got addicted to and knew I was going to be a salesperson.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny thing, going back to the point of like, I thought I was going to be in politics, I thought I was going to be a lawyer, I was pre law, all these things. I don't know. I was dumb enough and young enough that I looked in the yellow pages, saw the biggest ad print name, called the lawyer, took him out to dinner. He and I went to the most expensive steak restaurant in town because I knew he would actually pay, even though I had offered. And he said, look, Ben, how many t-shirts have you sold the night? And I was like, five. He's like, how much have you made? I'm like $72. He's like, I got to go back to an office to make more money and work more hours. You found a hack, right? So that was one that was like kind of steered me away from it. And two, what I realized about what I want to do for that profession, not that I loved arguing, but I loved sharing points of view and love trying to help people see things that maybe they hadn't seen clearly, which was debate and politics and law for me, which then when we won our first deal with the university bookstore, it was kind of helping them to see a completely different market that they hadn't had because they hadn't changed designs, they hadn't changed approach, they hadn't actually marketed or shared a message that students really cared about in a long time. Kind of that ability to convince.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He bought my shares out, and I forget what year that was. Remain friends to this day, but he's actually got everything to it, and I'm more kind of the emeritus Scani person, if you will, who probably claims more credit than I should these days.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So there and there's a bar now across the street from the stadium. There's a micro brew like beer that's sold throughout the Midwest. Yes. And a lot of it, what happened was it was actually one of the most unbelievable experiences, I think, for both Troy and I. And I don't want to speak for him, but I thought I was going to go to politics. I was going to be a lawyer, all these things. We sold our first big t-shirt deal to the University of Wisconsin bookstore. And at that point, I was like, holy cow, I love the sales thing. This is much more for me and more of my speed. So that's how I actually got into sales, I would say. And that's how I picked this as a profession one. And two, I mean, over our four years, it was insanely successful, I would guess, and say, in terms of notoriety and brand, we ended up actually having our wholesaler who was a buddy of ours as well, that actually held everything, held on the inventory, shipped it out for us. So we just kind of took a margin and ended up really, really minimal work for a lot of brand building and guerrilla marketing that was super fun to do.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love that we're starting here so my freshman year, a buddy of mine, Troy Vosler, and I lived in the same dorm, and we were both nerds in high school where we did a lot of t-shirts for sporting events, student council, all of those things. It was a time when like every rapper was getting into apparel. And so we were thinking like two kids had maybe one or two different or adult beverages on a Wednesday evening. We're like, we should start a t-shirt company. There was this word scanni, which is kind of the equivalent of cheesehead in the state of Wisconsin, which is, you know, being proud of all things Wisconsin brought cheese curds, drinking PBR on your John Deere tractor. We trademark the word. We sold, we both invested $300 out of our own money and like sold out of t-shirts in probably two days. And at that point, we were like, holy cow, we're on to something. We set up an e-commerce website. We started a wholesale business. And it was just right place, right time. And it's still like Troy's still room in the business and it's going really, really strong.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I cannot wait to get started. I'm excited to spend the time here and a little bit nervous about those interesting stories you've probably heard.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're looking at four different aspects of the business create, convert, close, and churn. Those are the four buckets. I tell people all the time, salespeople aren't lazy. They just are wired to find the quickest path from point A to point B.”
2024-08-02 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: 12-Week Step-by-Step Framework to Crush Every Sales Quarter | Moving from SMB to Enterprise: How and When | Verticalised Sales Teams: Why They are a Gamechanger and How to Build Them with Ben Fiechtner, CRO @ Clari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source