YouSaid · the spoken record

Doug Adamic

lines on the record: 56
first: 2023-09-08
most recent: 2023-09-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Thank you so much, Harry. This has been a blast. I love getting to know you. The questions are great. Thank you for your hard work and investment in all of the time and research to be able to do it. The fact that you talk to people and had aphorisms for me was a little shocking, but really, really good. Great job. Thank you.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know that this is maybe a cop out, but I still am impressed by salesforce.com and how they go about getting business, how they sell value, the way in which they create an experience and a customer success motion for the companies that they have, the breadth and depth of how they can add value and serve a customer in the impact that it can make. I think that that still is like sort of a gold standard for what I think has been very, very impressive and something that I'll strive for, to be honest with you, as I construct my business”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If a quarter is missed, you need to do a deep dive. But most of the time, if I'm trying to be positive that there are a number of inputs or key indicators that are going up and to the right that would be sort of indicative of successes just around the corner. So let's not make this a pattern. However, this is the stuff that we did wrong. But here's a whole bunch of stuff that is going up and to the right. So if we adhere to this, don't get rattled by getting a little bit of bad news and stay focused on adhering to the system, the process, and the playbook, then we know we're going to be able to work our way out of it. So it's the positive reinforcement that lean in on the system in the playbook and that those things are going to pay off in the long term.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just the perspective that salespeople are smarmy or like something like that, like I view sales in the world of sales as being really, really great consultants that help drive businesses improving and have a huge impact in helping companies become more competitive or achieve goals that they never have before. So if we can change the perspective that sales guys, a people person or a SMARMI kind of thing, then that would be huge.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making sure that you understand what buying criteria needs to change with your prospects in order for that to lead to your product. If you don't understand how you need to change the buying criteria to uniquely lead to your product, then you're not setting yourself and your team up for success.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not as much. The only reason being is most organizations now have policies in being able to receive gifts associated with that. So most companies have kind of alleviated that. But I go back to the conversation that we had before. Of course, there needs to be a relationship between myself as a salesperson and the company or the individual that I'm doing with. But what we're seeing is that customers will value you challenging their ideas or their status quo by being able to bring insights or use that are pushing the boundaries. So I go back to if you're teaching someone something and you're creating constructive tension, there's more respect for that relationship than whether we go to a Taylor Swift concert or something like that.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think leading with features and functionality, I think that buyers are getting much smarter now. And when you come in and you just start demoing or showing features and functionality that may have worked a while back when new innovation was happening, but there's so much innovation right now, I go back to my first answer. Not the thing that hasn't changed, selling value, the thing that has leading with your product, with feature and functionality.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. Anything to be able to reduce drag and friction so people can be more effective in their movements to go to the bank to make bigger deposits on a more regular basis I'm all in for because this is a tremendous profession that is ripe for innovation and change, but it's also a very necessary process for very complicated multi-product solution-based sales. It's very difficult to remove the human aspect, but if we can be more effective in it, then it's only going to serve both sides of the table perfectly well.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my gosh, yes. I think that we're already seeing it in the way in which we talked about it earlier, dissecting sales calls, looking for patterns, speech recognition, keywords, being able to do outreach, the marketing process, how to be able to engage, what to be able to key on. It's going to transform how and what and why we go about doing our business in the very near future.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experience with the right type of person, with someone who has segment experience but not industry experience, that's when you get your best, most innovative and sort of interesting sales campaigns and structure and distribution models, in my opinion. They rely too heavily on the salesperson having all the answers for how to be able to run a proper campaign or to understand how to position value or what kind of information is necessary when you're capturing it during the course of the sales campaign. So I think that founders underestimate the supporting”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like I said, yeah, yeah. I think it's the combination of both. And I know that that may seem like a cop-out answer for you, but I do believe that there needs to be the right kinds of individuals that have some industry experience in what we do selling, for instance, to the office of the CFO, or maybe something tangential to total spent management or spend management because there needs to be that experience and expertise that exists within the sales force. But like Brax, what I can't do is I can't have a full cadre of those people because I also am introducing a very, very new business solution that's out there and having a clean slate and maybe selling to the segment, whether it be startup or whether it be mid-market or enterprise, but not having the spend management experience is also very, very cool because they don't have any baggage or preconceived notions of what it could be. So when you can balance some”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was younger, I used to think being a great sales leader was always being at the top of the leaderboard. And now I find joy in building systems and departments and infrastructure where the output or the result of the byproduct of that is always crushing your quota. So it's the reorientation of not going for the quota. It's the reorientation of doing all the little things that actually create the byproduct of crushing your quota. So in my family, we have a saying, it's not the box score that the thing that you focus on. It's all the little things that the box score doesn't have because if you do those little things, the box score takes care of itself every single day and twice on Sunday.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that as prepared as you can be and as organized or as thoughtful that you can be, it's still people. And we are a human wrapper around a world-class product and we interface with all types of individuals in all different levels within the organization. And that creates a really unique platform that is unpredictable at times. People have bad days and good days and kids are sick. And my car broke down and stuff happens. And when you scale and you have hundreds, if not thousands of people working for you and you're interfacing with tens of thousands of individuals at companies, I think that that level of human unpredictability is the piece that, you know, sort of like leads into it a bit.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In your pipeline in a quarterly close, even though some things are always going to be able to push up. But having proper closed plans, setting that expectation up front, making sure we're holding each other accountable for the delivery of that, having that constructive tension, and being able to do that increases the probability that things remain in the quarter for sure.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reality is you can't close everything every quarter, and not everything is always going to go your way. So this is always going to happen. However, it is materially triaged when the sales rep and the entire team understands the timeline that we're marching towards. And when that becomes agreeable and we hold ourselves and the customer accountable for that, then we should be able to have a level of predictability as to what and how this is going to go forward. So right now we're looking at the quarter and we're building plans with our customers that will conclude the evaluation and arrive at a decision and an implementation timeline. You have to have those discussions in constructive tension at the beginning of the campaign to understand whether or not the customer's just shopping or whether they're actually looking to solve a problem and they're preparing themselves to be able to do it. That will create more predictability.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Value proposition and the impact we're going to have on the organization against what the controllable or uncontrollable event is going to be.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess it would be in the anticipation and the understanding of whether or not that organization was in a point where they needed more funding or they were doing like to not know what the financial aspect or pattern is of the organization you're selling to is inexcusable. And then two, yeah, certainly something happens. However, if you anticipate that that's a probability that it is going to happen, you have to hold that up against the value proposition that you're bringing and then understand as to whether or not it holds enough weight to be able to do that. So if funding is an issue, this one's an interesting one. If funding is an issue, we should know we should know that coming out of the gig. B, if the value proposition is weak enough where even a shift in that is going to throw this apple off the cart, then we have to be okay with the fact that that's the case or we didn't go wide enough or we don't know what's going on. So it's the depth of the value.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only reason that I get furious when we lose a deal is when we're surprised and that can reveal itself in a number of different ways. If you are running a proper deal, you shouldn't be surprised. And if at the end of a campaign, insert whatever it was that surprised you, that is a bad reason to lose a deal. Because if you're good at your profession, you should never be surprised as to why you lost the deal. It should be evident and you should have done it. And you don't win them all, totally. But if at the end we realized that there was an individual we didn't talk to, there was a department that was looking at something similar. Whatever the answer is here, that is inexcusable if you're running your campaign in the way in which we need you to run your campaign.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is constantly in that same area. What's a good reason to lose a deal? I think that if they don't have a business problem that we uniquely solve, you don't want to jam something down their throat because you're only going to have a terrible customer success implementation process down the road. There are non-controllable things that happen. People go out of business. People get bought. There's divestitures. So these are things that are sometimes outside of your control. That's why there's an old adage. You may know this. Time kills all deals. So that's why you're always constantly looking at your cycle time. How are you constructing this? How quickly can you get to a yes or a no? A no early is as good as a yes later. So making sure that you're constantly evaluating, you know, what is the activity you're doing and how effective are you being in your day?”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I normally have the frontline managers in each of the segments or each of the divisions be able to aggregate deal reviews for their team. The deal review process is a very, very finite process that talks about what are the challenges an organization has, what happens if we solve these challenges, where are we with our coverage model of the constituents that we believe would have insight or visibility into this or the reverberating effects of it? What kind of data have we received? What's the topography of their infrastructure? How are we creating a path to be able to help them conclude the process? Hopefully they buy us, but maybe they don't. But nobody just wants to be in these perpetual processes. So it's constantly taking a look at where are we missing information to be able for both parties to arrive at a decision to either let's partner or let's cut bait and move on from there. So the deal review process.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Add ons, expansions, purchase of other products or categories of products are a byproduct of doing all of this other stuff really, really well.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seeing that too. 100%, yes. You're only as good as the last promise you made and fulfilled with an organization, making sure that you're driving business outcomes that are important to the company, not for you. The second a customer thinks you're trying to do something that's benefiting you personally or Brex versus actually serving the customer, then all trust is lost. So what you're constantly trying to be able to do, Harry, is being able to understand the business challenges that they face, understanding how impactful that is to the organization, and then being able to talk openly about how we may or may not be able to participate in helping those come to life. And if you have a business process and a business review process supported by value engineering, research insight, experts, and you're bringing these ideas to a customer, that's when you have the most valuable relationship.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More about that, I do have a problem, and I'd like this kind of outcome. The sales campaign captures that. When it gets to customer success, the only thing the customer success person is doing is saying, we made a promise to you, you made a promise to us, it's governed by these rules and it's this outcome. Now let's go get it. And we just go in and we just make sure that that happens, have business reviews, readouts, and making sure that we're tracking towards the delivery of the promise that we made to them. If I do that, And if I do that consistently, I earn the trust to be able to ask for solving another business problem, making another promise. And when that flywheel starts to happen, that's when the customer relationship, that's when that really starts to make a material difference and becomes a competitive advantage in the market.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It begins with taking a look at the entire customer life cycle from beginning where we create awareness, the type of sales campaign that we run, what we capture during that sales campaign, what we pass over to the implementation team, how we're logging our interactions with those individuals, and then being able to transition to customer success. So making sure that during the awareness process for those people that raise their hand to learn more, we put them into a sales process that's indicative of their role and the business challenge that they have. We're capturing the information in a platform, passing that off to a sales-to-service handoff into the implementation team. The sales rep and the readiness team stay very close at hand. Sales rep peels off, the customer success is introduced during the implementation process. We catalog and log everything that needs to happen. The awareness process had somebody that said, I'd like to”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that there are always going to be marquee organizations that are going to require a level of attention or connectivity to a company at that level. But if I'm holding myself accountable as a CRO, we will want to have executive sponsorship with all of our marquee organizations, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it needs to be the CEO every single time. However, I do believe that the executive leadership team has a responsibility in the go-to-market and sales process to be able to represent the organization for these larger more marquee companies. But you want to load balance that out across the leadership team.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of the time people have personal goals or aspirations that are going to require some level of funding in order to be able to achieve. So the very first thing that I try to do is try to help people understand that the more they push themselves with personal goals and aspirations, the more it needs to be counterbalanced by professional advancement and the counterbalancing of that. So the very first thing most people don't believe that they can achieve such a level of greatness because they haven't”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we get signal back almost on a daily, even a weekly basis that would give us some insight that our current playbook would need tweaking. So how I handle it is that one of the departments that we built actually catalogues those things. And then when they build up to a specific level of residue, we figure out when is the right time to be able to augment the playbook and then be able to re-enable the teams and introduce that on a regular basis. So I don't introduce anything in the middle of a quarter. I'll only introduce something at the beginning of a quarter. There are certain things that are too disruptive to introduce in a quarterly basis. So we'll take those half year or full year. So you have to capture all of this data and then you have to take a look at it and then know when to introduce it so you just don't disrupt the business continuity in the”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Isn't going to be that promise that we're going to be able to deliver. So at the very highest level, steps in the process, checklists for each step, adhering to finishing that in order to go into the next one is really how I look at a playbook and how important that is to be able to do that.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it has a couple of different layers to it, if you will, Harry. For me, like a general sales playbook is the fact that in order for whatever segment you're talking about to run an effective campaign that provides a delightful customer experience where we explore whether or not there's potential for a partnership, you need to do these particular things in this particular sequence, in each one of these things has these criteria that have to be fulfilled before you go to the next one. And being able to get people to respect the fact that if you skip a step or you skip checklist items, it's going to reveal itself at the end. And it's not that you're trying to convince a company or trying to trick a company. This is honestly the fact that if you miss a step down the way, then that partnership.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I think depending on the company is how quickly they can understand what it is the purpose of the company is trying to do and what is the outcomes that a company is trying to elicit and how does that translate into improving a company's business. So if you don't understand how to change the buying criteria to lead to your product rather than leading with your product, then I think that's the biggest challenge, at least that I have in building and training a sales force is to refrain from being excited to talk about features and functionality and be more diligent in trying to understand how the company they're talking to operates and where uniquely we can be able to help achieve their goals by being able to deliver measurable. Outcomes.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And equipment to be able to do that, but there's only one way to run faster lengthen your stride and quicken your step. So we break down where the rep is or where the leaders are or where the teams are to say, what is preventing you from lengthening your stride and quickening your step. Let's remove those things and then let's lean in on the tooling to make that happen over and over again. That reveals itself differently in different teams, but that's the concept of it.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, all of these statements that you've somehow found have all going back to the fact that most people in the world don't live to work, but they work to live. So these aphorisms that we're talking about are just gentle reminders to make people understand. These are things that you constantly have to think about, not just in your professional life, but in your personal life as well. So when I say this, like when quotas go up and territories shrink, that's the definition of growth, then the only way for you to be able to make more money is to go faster. And there's only two ways in the world, regardless of who you are, what age you are, what shape you are, whatever, to go faster in this world, which is you have to lengthen your stride and quicken your step. It's really not that difficult. Now, there's a thousand different books and techniques and tools.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Demean that because if you did your discovery and establish yourself correctly, then this is the fair value for what it is and you should be able to continue that constructive tension and being able to command that provided your organization delivers on that promise over and over again. So I don't feel as though I need to overly discount in order to be able to add value to an organization or create that compelling event in general.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Discounting is a difficult thing because you always want to charge what is fair for the value that you're bringing. And if you did the work up front to establish that value, then salespeople and their leaders should feel confident in standing up for that. Discounting and creating that kind of buying pattern for your organization or for your service is going to set a bad precedent. Again, if I go back to what we were talking about before about going to the bank and making bigger deposits, there are a few things that needs to consider in order to do that. How do I increase my average deal size? How do I shrink my cycle time? And how do I make sure that I have more units in my pipeline that are converting at a higher rate? Discounting or playing shenanigans or games is only going to”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To understand how the business operates will reveal whether or not there is an issue that requires immediate triaging right now, whether there are precursors for the beginnings of an issue that could come down the way, or maybe there's individuals that have joined the organization that are looking for transformation. So there's only three reasons why an organization will make a purchase. They are in trouble right now. They see trouble coming or an individual or group wants to be made a hero and get ahead of something. So the only thing you're trying to figure out is how to be able to do that. And most of the time it creates enough compelling events.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the shortest answer for that is that you have a value proposition that's either going to save the company money, make the company money, save time, or do something so dramatic that waiting another day or another week has a financial impact on that. And then if you're capable of being able to articulate that as cleanly and crisply as possible, then every day you wait that you don't address this problem, you're just hemorrhaging cash or throwing money out the window. That's going to be the easiest way to be able to do that. It means you have to have a very strong value proposition. You have to be very diligent in your discovery. We talked about this earlier. You have to talk to multiple constituents and you have to put a business case that all folks believe is something that is going to be impactful to the organization. So having multiple interviews, doing a deep discovery, forcing yourself”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what manifests itself is sales wraps if they don't take that like seriously they try to force deals to happen and they're not being honest in whether or not their activity is as effective in achieving their goal because you don't wake up every single day and say, hey, how hard can I work for as little payback as possible? It's literally the opposite way around. They're like making decisions on the activity they're doing directly in front of them and saying, does this get me closer to going to the bank to make larger deposits more frequently or is this taking me away from that? And if it's taking me away, raise your hand. I want to come over and understand how to reduce that drag, how to be able to get more frictionless activity. In your business, so you can be able to do that. So it's a constant feedback loop in that.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make more money because I'm leaning in on the system, I'm leaning in on the playbook to be able to do that. So my message to my frontline is my goal if it reveals itself in a very precise way is you go to the bank and make larger deposits more frequently because you're following the rules in the playbook that were put into place. And until that doesn't happen, you should always be able to lean into that. So this is sort of a philosophy and motivating and helping articulate that to salespeople.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you're talking with salespeople, one of the things, this is going to be a weird thing, one of the things that is incredibly important is for a salesperson to understand effectiveness in their movements are going to give them more capacity to be able to sell more. What I try to do is say, hey, you know what? If I do my job correctly and you lean in on the playbook and you follow the rules that have been set up, technically you should be able to get more done in a day to be able to make more frequent trips to the bank to make bigger deposits because that's why you're here. And I'm not going to be doing my job if it's more difficult for you to make a living or over time when your territory shrinks and your quota goes up, you can't balance the fact that I can still work the same amount of time or less and be able to.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nope, it's interesting. I would say that both are difficult to be able to pull off. Both have characteristics that are very similar. The larger organizations have much more complex layers to it, politics, history, things like that. And when you're dealing with more startup organizations or newer organizations, it's not easier, but it's just a different pattern. But they both exist and you have to fight through it in both situations.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or you want to just cut bait and we don't have an opportunity. The faster we can get to that, the more time we'll save for one another. So you have to be okay pushing the customer to be able to do something that they don't want to do, but it's in their best interest to do it because the thing that I'm trying to help them understand is something that they don't fully understand. So I have to bring that expertise. I have to push the agenda and I have to be okay with constructive tension to change sort of their thinking or maybe even lead them to something that they didn't know was broken or that they didn't recognize in the first place.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a difficult one because you have to be okay with constructive tension in a sales campaign. And if you don't have constructive tension in a sales campaign, then you're probably not introducing something that's pushing the boundaries of the thinking of the group you're talking to. So the way in which I coach to be able to do that is the fact that we have a very, very specific thing that we do to improve a customer's business. And it drives outcomes that they have yet to fully understand because it is a disruptive way of being able to think about it. In order for me to determine whether or not we have a platform to be able to do business, these are the steps I have to take to be able to do that. The benefit is Mr. Customer or person I'm talking to is that you will be able to determine whether or not this is something you would want to continue to invest more.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, in a very, very pragmatic sense, asking that individual the last time they implemented something similar to Brex. And then just listen. And if they don't have a precise or concise answer or can't point back to something that they did, then you probably are not talking to the buyer. You're probably talking to an influencer or maybe even someone that's going to have a massive impact on the overall. But if they haven't bought something and can articulate, yes, this is what happened, this is what I did, this is what I bought, this is how it went, and this is what happened. It's difficult. The reality is that most often we can study the patterns of what happens with similar organizations. And I can train the salesperson that, hey, if you're going into a 500 person.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Focus to people to say every word you say, every action you do has to be precise and it has to be leading toward something that you want to get done. So I always make that thing, like you're tossing thread through multiple needles. That's how precise we need to be. And if you're not thinking that way, then you're doing yourself in the company that you're actually trying to serve, a complete disservice.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when I'm talking with and coaching my either leaders or my sales folks or all of the contributing departments that are there, I don't think that people recognize that a properly run sales campaign begins at hello, right? And so you have this thread. And in order to get a deal done, especially in this environment, you have to be so precise in the way in which you're tossing that. And it's not just going through like, hey, I've got to just convince the CFO or I just have to convince the vice president of finance or control it. You actually have to throw that thread and you have to be able to convince and hook multiple people, maybe five, six, seven people through that. So it's how precise are you? Did you line everything up? And when you toss it, you really have only one toss because companies today aren't going to give you a second or third chance if you falter during the course of your campaign. So it's a way to bring”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Well, first of all, yeah, money is tight, and I'm not necessarily only competing with competitors in my market or in my industry. I'm competing for total share of wallet for anybody that's out there. So fighting for a dollar of investment from a company is really, really tough. So that's for sure. Now, the uniqueness about this, Harry, is the fact that the pattern in which a lead like transforms into an actual demand and then gets into a campaign is much harder. So maybe five, seven years ago, you used to touch an individual four times or five times before they would convert into wanting to learn more about your business. Now we're up to like 16 or 20 times to be able to do that. So it's just making sure you're putting these processes in place and understanding the patterns that happen and don't get too herky jerky in getting too early because you'll fling them off the hook. You've got to let it.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, I struggle with that comment inherently because you're saying, hey, in bad times, how is it difficult to be? I think that those are the best times to create demand when you are focused on being able to drive value in regards to investments a company makes in giving employees money to spend on their behalf, the tighter the times are, the more they need to pay attention to this. So I guess it's a mindset. We're building pipeline incredible right now going through that because of the times that they're in.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So at Brex, because of the business that we're in, a project can be initiated by a number of different constituents or personas within an organization at multiple different levels for multiple different reasons. So the first thing is that you need to be able to have the content to understand how to communicate to those personas in regards to maybe the business challenges that they have. So product marketing, positioning content is incredibly important. And then two, you have to be able to have attributes and scoring of the leads when they come in and accuracy in the data hygiene of that. You have to make sure that people are monitoring and capturing all of this data along the way because it is very data driven in regards to that. And then you follow through the pipeline and being able to see how that's going to be able to convert over time.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pipeline in order to make your goals, not necessarily when I left Concur and where I'm trying to drive Brexit, is we had less than one X pipeline going into a quarter because we knew how to build pipeline in the customer base. We knew how to be able to convert it. So our effectiveness in pipeline creation just created the proper pipeline to be able to do those kinds of things. So in that is where we're trying to get to. It's not the abundance of pipeline, it's the quality of the pipeline from source by conversion, by channel, and then you can be able to dial in from there.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're speaking about pipeline then first I begin with the source by which the pipeline is created. That can be inbound, that can be partner, that can be self-generated, that could be internal referrals from the organization and so on and so forth. So first of all, we understand where is it that we can be able to get our pipeline. Then we have to create attributes to that pipeline to be able to understand the characteristics of it. And primarily the way in which I would go that is the quality of that pipeline of conversions at each stage of the pipeline process. So then we can be able to dial in and say, okay, this message through this channel converts at a higher rate. And then you can adjust your levers and your dials to be able to lean in on that, to be able to have better pipelines. So the goal would be not to create, everyone talks about like, you need to have 5x pipeline. You need to have seven x.”
2023-09-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Why Everyone is Responsible for Demand Generation, How to do Great Sales Discovery, How to Reduce Sales Cycles and Create Urgency and Deal Reviews; Good and Bad Reasons to Lose a Deal with Doug Adamic, CRO @ Brex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source