YouSaid · the spoken record

Frank Fillmann

lines on the record: 60
first: 2023-03-22
most recent: 2023-03-22
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

“Me, it's Miro. Now that everything's been remote, and of course, we're trying to like ramp that back. I'm super brain, super creative. I like to grab a whiteboard at an office and work through stuff. I'm super visual. It's really hard to do remote. I put like a whiteboard up in my office. My wife throws it away. And so Miro's like the technology that enables the ability to feel connected as a team, have a connected sort of set of tools that bring all these disparate ideas together and allow the team to rally when you're remote. And then that's now in digital format that you can bring into the office and extend it when you're in person. So that's really been something that's helped us in the last couple years.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Empathy. I think we need to really remember how hard it is for our team. Go look at the last two years. How hard is it to be a sales rep who might have joined an organization? And after two years never actually went into an office to be able to like get in the mindset of a sales rep who's never actually been in. They haven't met their comrades. They haven't met the customer face to face. And remembering just how hard that is. And as you go farther up in the organization, more and more of our job as sales leaders is internal. But if you get too far away from the customer, you get too far away from the rep, you forget how dang hard it is to do their jobs. And so being empathetic and spending quality time with them keeps you humble, keeps you relevant. So that's probably the one thing I change.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not about you. It's about your team. So I always think that you want to put the customer first. I think you got to put the employee first before the customer. It's always been kind of wild to me that folks would be self-focused as a sales manager because by definition, you're as successful as your team is. And so like I was just reading the book, The Go Giver. I want my team to be more successful than I ever have been. I want them to be able to create wealth for their families. And so I think the more that I work for them, I serve them and they know that and I'll do anything they need for me to do. So I think just running a very flat organization, being very selfless and driving their success, what I found is not only did they end up producing, it creates a level of incredible loyalty that you really weren't planning on. Sometimes they don't want to leave the nest even when they need to. So it's kind of simple, but I don't see it enough.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think everything starts and ends with the customer. If you understand their needs, I think everything else is going to work better. I do think in some particularly large deal cycles, you don't want to give someone an app bat where they've never really been in the big game before. That's not really fair. But if I had to stack rank that industry experience and driving client trust and relevancy, you can reverse engineer everything a lot easier than having big experience on a deal, but not understanding what's going to make your customer successful.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there's a maturity curve of an organization going from a few customers to really big in scale. And I think as you start to hire the sales team, you're going to get to a maturity point where you want to move upmarket. Customers have a different expectation. And I think trying to train folks that don't have the enterprise experience and convert them over. I don't think it's setting them up for success. I think you need to be able to find folks that have done this before that bring in the top end of the game and then having really good segmentation. S&B commercial enterprise and then alignment by industry. You need to hire the proven team that's got experience doing that. Your customers expect it, but you still want the other team to be able to manage the lower end of the business because they really know the organization of the product. So I think it's a complement to those two things.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hiding information, the idea of solution selling, which is I have information you don't, and I'm going to tell you what people have wild access to information on your firm and the organization and the product. I think recognizing that and being super transparent and coming in saying, tell me what you know about it and being really authentic with that, I think hiding information and trying to be protective, that's 20 years ago.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say there's two things that I learned in COVID. One is if you're a hunter rep, if you're like an SMB, it's really hard. You're trying to build a relationship from scratch. Fortunately, we were in the enterprise space, so we didn't have that. But in the enterprise space, I think one thing that we would do is we build like a big executive briefing and we would send Uber Eats gift cards to everyone who would be a part of that briefing. And we would have like a really nice digital experience. And we were trying to bring in the events team and get really kind of clever and crafty and make it fun and exciting for the customer. And then on the internal side, we would do a lot of virtual happy hours at the very beginning when people were scared. How do you kind of bring morale up, get people connected? But I think now that we're on the back end of COVID, the value of face-to-face when you can do it and it's safe, we need to bring that back.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it changed, but the need for it didn't change. So now that we're cycling back to phase, what I'm finding is it's really difficult to build relationships when you're remote. It's easier to retain them over time. But I think what I'm finding is the absence of face-to-face, something is missing from the cycle, you've got to find a way to recreate that, acknowledging that it wasn't there for a while. We've got to bring that back.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's the deal, Harry. That's a competitive advantage, right? And so you recognize that very few people do that. What they want to do is just hire more people. The ability, I think, to”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Customer on the journey and inspire them and excite them, and then get them to the state mentally where they believe you and they see what the outcomes can be. That is an art that is extremely difficult to find. And when you can find someone who has it, you grab them, you bring them over, and you just give them all the resources possible and you try to retain them as long as possible. That is a skill and a value that's very difficult to find that and teaching people to communicate with senior executives, hard to find skills. And so I appreciate that when I see it.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you think about talent bringing the right people in, okay, let me ask you a question. Here, have you ever bought a house apartment? Sorry, you go through the process. When I bought my house, it was nice foundation, terrible color, terrible decoration. And so what happens is most people would go through this process of buying a house and they look at it. And if they can't see the end state, they don't have the vision to do so. They're not going to buy it. So I literally told my agent when I bought my house. I was like, I'm so glad this color of this house was rust red. She goes, no one else said that. I'm so surprised to hear you. And so, well, if it was white, it would have been sold a year prior and I wouldn't have been able to afford it. So quite literally, the idea that people that can visualize the end state, that's a very powerful tool and it's very rare to be able to do that. And by the way, customers have a hard time doing that. They're busy. They're stressed out. They've got a million things to do, finding people that can be visionary, that can imagine the end state and then creatively reverse back engineer through the lens of the customer, the challenges that they're going to see and then how to remediate that and then bring that to life and take.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest challenge you want to solve is alignment with how the company reports to their shareholders, whether that's a private or public company. How is the company measured? And then make sure there's alignment all the way down to how the sales rep is paid. I think in the absence of that, there's going to be a tension point where what the customer wants and what the rep wants is wildly different from what leadership wants. And then you take the salespeople, whether it's a first or second line manager, they're in the middle getting squeezed, where the people above and below them want wildly different things. And that creates a lot of tension in the cycle. If you've got full alignment, this is how the organization is being measured. This is how the reps being paid. You're driving aligned incentives and then everything starts to work a lot better. So I think if that fundamental principle is there, the other problems start to work themselves out.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them come in and don't do a quarterly business review, have a success review and elevate them, put them on a pedestal, put a spotlight on them, make them successful. The client's going to appreciate that because you're not just trying to sell. You're trying to drive value. And now their critical path in the cycle. And what otherwise would be a lagging function that's trying to run and chase up and make everybody happy? Now their critical path. And if you have a big customer and they do a big buy, now you're going to have to otherwise go grab the success person and bring them in and say, like, I need you to do all this stuff. And they're like, I don't even know what they bought. And so how do you make them successful? You bring them along during the process and treat them like a teammate and make sure they know that you're helping them hit their metrics. And that's going to be one way to help them.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As my career has grown, what I've known this is a big part of my job is dealing with all of my parallel peers, the extended team. Like that's in some cases the majority of my job. By the way, the first question I always ask every time I meet with those leaders, how are you measured? What do you need for me? And these are the three things I need from you. And do we have agreement and alignment on what those priorities are for both of us and what the expectations are? So every time we talk, I don't want to go through everything else. Let's start there. And then we'll cover the rest of it. So I think like an area where it's really hard right now is customer success because the customer might beat them up. The sales team has very different goals than they do. And what I find is a lot of time the sales team doesn't understand how success is measured and paid. They don't appreciate the challenges of how hard it is to be a success manager because everybody wants something from you and you've got to be everywhere. If you're measured against everything, you're measured against nothing. And so I think one way to kind of make that problem smaller, bring success on the sales calls with you. Make sure they're client facing.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wire top to bottom, but it's not in your interest, it's in theirs. If someone's stuck, have the bat phone to call your peer who's my boss. That drives transparency, because at all times they know they have ultimate access to your organization. When that happens and there's risk in the cycle, you don't have to worry about it because you've got the entire place wired. And so I think if you've got like an obsessed mindset, you're going to have every angle covered. And when one predictably falls astray, great news. You remediate that, but everything else is going to stay in place.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you do it? I think it starts with customer obsession. If you really want to understand what the customer needs, I think the traditional sales cycle of thoughtful discovery in a few meetings and being single-threaded into like one buying unit or one person, that's scary. What if someone leads the organization or like you said, what if the sponsor leaves? Like that drives problematic approaches. So if you really want to get to know the account, you're going to be obsessed. Buy the share. If you're selling to a cell phone organization, go buy the cell phone, go into the store, talk to the retail sales associate. You get to really understand broadly the challenges across the organization in a multifaceted way. Number two, you want to start threading in conversations from like IT to data to the line of business all the way across. The other thing you want to do is have really good top-to-top alignment. And I don't mean when it's deal time. I mean like before it's deal time, where does a thoughtful conversation of aligning whether it's the CEOs together or the CIOs together or line of business executives together if you take this customer obsessed mindset? You're going to have that entire organization.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the technology that solves the problem, but it forces the rep to think through the client problem through the lens of the customer, not the lens of product. And so it's going to force to say, if you're going to build...”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an hour and a half a week. The first 30 minutes is freeform. Maybe it's because there's an urgent deal and we just need to pivot into whatever senior leadership might need that week or I have a house on fire. We need to solve. Great. Let's identify it and swarm. The second hour is very structured and it's a little bit more looking forward. So I might have an hour broken into 20 minute slots and I've got three reviews. Maybe that's this quarter or next quarter. And what they're going to do, very programmatic to show me two slides. One is the why slide and one is the big deal review slide. And the y slide, what I'm going to do is say I want you to tell me exactly through the lens of the CEO's long-range priorities. Maybe it's a CIO or a CDO or a chief operating officer, but let's take the CEO for the example and say, what are the long-range plans? And then you say, great, what's going to inhibit them from hitting that? What would be the value of accomplishing those goals? How would you quantify the value of solving that problem? And you kind of go left to right where what's important to them is paramount. And far off on the right, if you use your binocular.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get there. Here's this proposal. You're not going to get there with this proposal. Let's work together to bridge the gap so you hit your goal. And I think if you do that authentically, you're helping that person and you're not being critical. You're not looking over the shoulder. You're just trying to drive increased odds of success. But in so doing, you've got to be like really in there with the rep. So you got to be like a leader and a sales rep. And you just have to be able to fluctuate back and forth.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's two kinds of super ups. There's the good and the bad, so just go with me here. So I think if you're a controller intented leader where you've always got to be the person in the meeting or, hey, I did this or I'm going to get overly involved or I'm going to micro this person. That's not great. But I do think if you want to understand how to drive success in the field, if you look at your job as internal and the sales rep as external and you're too far removed from the customer, that's terrifying to me. All of our big deals, we do a weekly review full stop every single week. One of the biggest deals in the week or the quarter of the month or the year. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to get really involved. And the second I see something go off the rails, great. I have a two hour block in my calendar. Cancel whatever you got. Let's get on the phone and we're going to spend time rebuilding your entire value prop. And then next week, I want to see how that goes. And so I think that's the way that I get sort of micro, but it's in the interest of the rep and the first question I ask on a big deal review is, what's your goal, not your quota? What's your goal? What do you need to be financially successful this year? Great. Now, how do we?”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or four dynamics, you should be able to call your business, but I think when you look at the Wall Street Journal, you can tell when there's going to be more cost pressures. So like we spent a lot more time forecasting and truing up and doing like checks and balances now as you should in this cycle. So you're never going to remediate all of the risk. But I tell you what you can do is you can microwave it a little bit and take it out of the cycle and have a more predictable forecast.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's three pieces. One is you need a very left brain math model that looks at all the historicals and says on an average ratio, this is our close rate to pipe. Like there's basic math that everyone should include as part of the cycle. Number two, everyone should be layering in AI to be able to at a predictable level. If you're a big organization at scale, understand trends. Because if everyone else in the organization is seeing a downfall in forecast, technology is going to pick that up where if you've got a team of five people in a small territory, you're not. You don't have a chance to pattern match because you're not talking to a thousand reps, but the tool is. The third is I think you need to have like a right brain qualitative review of everything in your cycle. So what we do is we do a bottoms up, deal by deal analysis, and then we go back and compare it to the math model and whatever AI says. And we go, do we believe the truth of this? And I think if you're really involved in your business, if you're like out talking to customers and listening to them and asking qualifying questions, I think between those three.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. They want to do more with less. Cost matters. Efficiency matters. This is when you're going to get more financial buyers as part of the process. If you haven't organized your story around these new evolving priorities, shame on you because their priorities have shifted, your messaging and your value prop should absolutely be shifting in alignment with them or you're going to be irrelevant and that's your fault.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Says time to value is faster, ROI is there, this is going to drive shareholder value in these meaningful ways. And then I think the qualitative value, which I don't think a CFO is really going to buy into is as a side benefit. You might raise sales. As a side benefit, you might have happier people. As a side benefit, you might reduce your carbon footprint because you've moved to the cloud. Now, these are things that like a CFO would look at and say, first, they've done their homework. Second, my team has validated this. Third, now I want to lean in and not object to it, but maybe ask some questions. You're avoiding all of these inhibitors to a sale and maybe enlisting the support of someone that all they care about is financial value. So if you skip it, it's going to be problematic to a sales cycle.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, here's the way I would do it. I was like, after you go through, what are your value and values? What is the problem we're solving? What is the solution? What is the success and roadmap? What is the value? And then what is the pricing and what is the next step? Like that's the logical process. Before you get to pricing is the value. And I think the value slide has a few different pieces to it. If you're being really specific here, it's a Google slide. But you've got to think through a few lenses. One is the economic value of buying. Are they getting a good deal? Are they avoiding cost? Are they saving money? And part of that is fee reduction as an example. And another part is how do you consolidate and do cost reduction in this cycle where, hey, I have 15 vendors. How do I standardize on one? So cost reduction or cost savings has a lot of different pieces. The other piece of that is value. How do they drive value to the organization? Now, if you've done your homework right and you've asked the questions, you know how they're measured, you've read the 10K, you know what is important to that organization financially, and you've built a value framework that”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'd say two things. Number one, in this environment, the first question is have you adapted a lens on the buying cycle for the CFO to review it? Is there a quant element of value inside the proposal that a CFO who's never met with you, who will never meet with you, who's never used a technology, could look at, understand, and say, I like what I'm seeing financially because we have a new buyer in the cycle that was never there. That's the CFO. And they're probably going to get personally involved in an enterprise deal that's material. And if you haven't evaluated that and haven't role played that, then you're going to fail. That's number one.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You to start now. And by the way, take advantage of your enterprise buying power and our fiscal year end to get the best technology financial deal that aligns to your success. And if you focus on their success and their outcomes and a faster ROI table, then they might believe you and want to lean in and buy earlier. But I think if you do it based on what's in the best interest of the firm that you're representing, I don't know that it's going to land as well.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if it starts with you as an organization and what's in the interest of the firm trying to sell it, they're going to see through that. I don't think it's going to work. I think it's going to be through the lens of the client. Full stop. So let's take an example. I'm a customer. I'm trying to stand up a new program. That's always going to require people process and tech, but tech's got to enable something to get set up. And they go, hey, we have to go live next July. We don't need it yet. This is Q4. Come back in six months. Well, we go, great. You need it in July. When do you do user testing? Well, we're going to do user testing in May. So when do you need to administer the technology? Well, we'd probably do that in February or March. Great. So when would you need to stand up the technology and have a contract in place? Well, maybe like January, February. And if you actually take that very logical objection of not now, we're six months away and you programmatically work back and you create a successful plan based on their timeline, chances are they need to get going right now. But you can't make the assumption they understand it because this is what your job is, not theirs. So you've got to build out this. Here's a success plan over the next six months and require.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the people for the people. I'll literally bring in my industry team, my sales reps, my engineers, me, and we'll sit down and say, let's bring together the last six months of learnings and let's go rebuild the industry playbook based on what's actually working, what's monetizable, even with COVID. The world's changed a lot in two years. If you're not adapting your cycle, it's going to be stale. So you have to do that. And then we put together five very simple point and shoot slides that a fifth grader could read and understand. And then you take that and you say, this isn't the end all be all. it's a template make it yours make the questions yours but let it inform the discovery so when you're asking questions the buyer is like wow they did their homework i appreciate that i want to lean in and help this person”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first off, I drive people crazy. So, like, I did this personality test a few years ago with my coach. And what I found out is I'm full-blown left brain and right brain at the same time. And the absence of focus, I'm everywhere. And so what I have to do is get really focused on what's the idea, how do we prioritize, say on message, and then execute with focus. So that's one of those learnings as a leader that I've tried to get better at over time. So a big part of what we do as a team is we want to bring the creative energy in. We want to bring the right people not to conform to our group, but bring in a lot of diverse set of experiences and personalities and perspectives. So we do a lot of right brain creative whiteboardy stuff to come together on, hey, we try these five different points with a customer, three fail, two work. Let's go in on those two. So it's very much trial and error mistakes, very encouraged in our group. So if you screwed up and the client meeting went poorly, great. Tell us so we don't go do that again. And so whenever we build the playbook, they'll end up in slides. But the way that we build it, we call it.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, number one, you know where the money is. You're making the right sales call. You're talking to the right person. You're pursuing the right opportunity. And when you show up, you're talking the love language of the client. Immediately you're relevant. Immediately you get ramped and you've qualified out. The opportunity isn't worth pursuing or it is. And you've jumped along in the sales cycle. Now you race back at the end of the quarter and you rebuild your top account playbook. You rebuild your account plan. And then now you've got three quarters to find and close the revenue versus finding out in Q2 or Q3. And now you're in a race to the end of the year. And I think when you're in a race, it's really hard to perform. How do you ramp them and give them some space to run? That's how you do it. So I think what you do in Q1 completely determines the success of your year.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Four kids. So one of my kids is walking out in the morning to go to school. They don't want to prepare their meal. They don't want to pack the lunch. They want to get the caprice on the apple, the sandwich, put it in a paper bag, go out and they want to eat. And so if I'm a new rep, I don't want to go figure out everything about my product, everything about the industry and the customer and go build this whole thing that by the way, all of their peers did. You got to drive a level of repeatability. So what we do is we build industry playbooks. So if we're covering an insurance company and the insurance adjuster, that example we used earlier, we're going to put together five slides. In the industry, with 80% accuracy, these are the problems they're faced with. These are the solutions where we fit. These are examples where it works. These are the outcomes of customers who have solved the problem with our technology and the outcome of it. And then here's a success plan to get there. And what it does is it doesn't replace discovery, but it gives them a framework to say with 80% accuracy, you're probably going to land well if you use this process.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit contrarian, and we've talked about a couple pieces, but let's take Humpty Dumpty apart and look at Q1. The first thing I want to do is I want to build an account plan, but let's call that a hypothesis. That way we're immediately starting to take action. We're mobilizing both the sales team and the extended team, but immediately from there, I'm going to pause and say, great, let's go do the TAM analysis. Where's the money? Where's the opportunity? From there, I'm then going to align the sales process to where that revenue opportunity is. And if I'm doing my job right, I'm running an AND business. I'm going to pick off some of the small deals along the way. I'm going to go for the big bet. And ideally, there's a path to hit my quota both ways. So at the end of the year, if I intersect and both hit, I'm going to have a monster year. If one of the two hit, I'm going to have a pretty good year. From there, the third step is we're going to create like an industry playbook. I think playbook is sort of like this ambiguous term. So I don't mean like the PhD version of a playbook. What I mean is I'm a sales rep. I'm about to go on a call. What I don't want to do is go prepare all the materials. I just want to go out and make the sales call. So let's say you're walking out like I've got.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A really good point. First off, you got to set them up for success. If it's a big account and they're going to do a big buy every couple years, you can cyclically understand what the odds are of that person coming in. And I think if it's a one to two year sales cycle and you have someone new, maybe it's more of an 18 to 24 month sales cycle. So if you put them in with the hope that they're going to land it in the first year, you're setting them up for failure. So I think you can prohibit some of that. So I think you either give that account to them in year two or you don't give that account to them at all. I think measuring the effectiveness along the way is predicated on setting them up for success at the beginning of the year. But I also think that if you're a team and you're going on sales calls together, you know if they're doing the job or not. There's no escape from that if you're actually giving them ample time to prep to go on the meeting with them and to debrief. Your job as a leader is to spot that it shouldn't be hard.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's take two examples. One example is you've got a big account that you're pursuing and you've got two or three reps. The first thing I do is grab the hypo and put them inside of that organization. So they're teaming along with it. If not, I think there's a level of babysitting and I say that as a positive term, not a negative term.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then you go, great, you've demonstrated the experience, go. But I think if you start there, you're kind of leaving them out in the wind, and that's not fair for them”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's almost when you outsource to someone to say, hey, I think you're really good. You've got good potential. There's a big meeting coming up. You've got this. That's crazy for me. What I want to do, whether it's me or one of my leaders, it doesn't matter who in the stack does this. Someone who's more experienced, get in the trenches with that person and say, look, you've never had a CEO meeting before. Let's figure out how they're going to operate and run the meeting. First off, they might run the meeting and you're just going to have to go along with it. So whenever you're going to plan for, you can just toss right out the window. And you don't know that until you go through it during the preparation and the role playing, having that senior leader step by step with them to say, here's an experience I went through, but also ideally you have a senior leader go with them on that meeting and they play the role. So maybe they're teeing them up with a softball question that they can hit out of the park or they're there in case it goes off the rails they can hop in. But I think having someone riding shotgun with you in the car and then giving the freedom to go take the wheel a little bit is really important once you get through that hand holding process you get a few add bats you'll find the reps like i think i got this and”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an easy one for me. It's always hypo one experience two. There's always an exception to that, though. I think when you have like a big, mature customer and a big brand with a lot of visibility, you'll always have to take experience first. You don't want someone learning on the job in a very high profile environment because then you might be setting them up for failure. And that's not fair to them as a sales rep. With the exception of that, I'll always hire for potential. And I want to take someone who's got a tremendous amount of adaptability and future potential, give them a job they might be a year away from, watch them be a little bit nervous and stumble for a quarter, but what's going to happen is they're going to get there way faster. I'll always go potential first.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've certainly over my old career. I'd say the biggest mistake I made was trying to team people together that were both alphas. I think being an alpha in sales is really good. You want the natural leader, but if they do it at the expense of other people and there's an ego involved, and then you have two of those together, it will crash and burn immediately. Stylistically, that's where the hair on the back of my neck stands up. And I say, I don't want to go through that again. And I want to be able to parent that person with someone who might say, you know what? I don't have as much at bats. Pair me with them. They're going to exponentially learn. They're going to get three years of education in a year when they get paired up with the alpha. So it's healthy. It's just not healthy together.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the feedback loop, which is where you're going, it's less about recording and dissecting. It's also less about waiting a whole quarter and giving feedback. It's really hard and it never lands well. I like to do an obsessive in the trenches process with my team where we spend a lot of time prepping. We do a lot of time role playing. We go to the meeting together. And the first thing we do when we're done is we go debrief. And the first thing is like, all right, give me some criticism. What did I do wrong? So it's not like me as a leader talking down to someone. All of us have an opportunity to learn. We're all this thing together versus like, how am I being evaluated or critiqued? Because if you go back to safety, if I feel like I'm being critiqued, I'm going to get defensive and I'm not going to get the best output. So I don't like the formal process. I like just to say, how do we get better at our craft? So next time it's going to land even better.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone's going to say, all right, they're showing up trying to help me out. And I don't know that every negotiation starts that way, but the best ones I've been involved in start that way”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We talked a little bit about what sales tactics have changed over the last 20 years. Protectionism, I think things are a lot more transparent. Customers have access to all kinds of data about your organization, about products, about negotiation. The idea of being closed-ended, like you have all the information and you don't want to share it, we're 20 years past that. It's about being really transparent. But if it starts with you, I don't think it's really authentic. It's got to always start with them. I was reading a book called The Go Giver, and it's like, how do I serve the person I'm working with and working for? Genuinely as the priority and then you back into what's good for you. So I start with what are your priorities? What are the mistakes? What do you not want to see? What's really going to irritate you? If you're going to try to solve this internally, where are you going to catch a lot of flack? And then I say, great, now that I understand this, here's how we are generally measured. And here's some overlap. And then what I want to do immediately up front, Arias say, what are the friction points that we can acknowledge? We're probably going to bump heads here. So let's just identify it. We'll try to work through those with a very unique solution. And I think if you do that authentically.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you start to align on deal structure, whether it's like is it a flat or is it a ramp when you start to really categorize all the different ways to package a solution? If you do your job right and you're authentically looking for ways to create a win for them while being transparent about what a win for you looks like, then by the time they get the first offer, it's going to land well because it's very predictable. And then when they counter or you counter, it should be very predictable because they've already told you what they're interested in and so have you. And it takes something like the gamanship out of it where you're just trying to find a win on both sides. When you start with price, it's really hard to get there.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest mistake is when you just send a price over and then you end up arguing about numbers. You ever see this? You send a proposal and whether it's a percentage savings or the absolute number, it's human nature negotiation to look at that and then want that number to be smaller. And so sometimes you get lost on all the wrong details. So if it's me, my preference would always be start with a blank canvas, find your buyer, and spend some quality time. And I think you'd ask questions of her like this. Number one, how are you measured? What are the metrics that you as an organization, as an individual are measured by at the organization level? And you start to really unpack how they define value and values and what their priorities are. And then you go like a level deeper. What's most important is it cash flow? Is it TCO? Is it year one fees? Is it exit fees? And you can start to kind of profile what financial levers do you have to play with that matter to them commensurately, you've got to be super transparent with your organization. Here's how we're measured. Here's how we report. These are the prioritized levers that we have. Here's what we want. If you do that,”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we talked about the TAM example where demand is known or unknown, I think how do you create money that doesn't exist? You go look at the demand that's inbound and then you look at the latent demand that doesn't exist. That's an immediate way to increase the TAM that you're pursuing without hiring any more people. And so when I think of creating demand that doesn't exist and you ask someone that, what problems does a customer have that they don't understand how to solve where you've created an answer to them? So go back to like the Frank Slootman example. He worked with different firms where he'd ask clients what they thought about the product and they were using it in very diverse ways that surprised the organization. So at a product level, they're like, hey, we didn't design it that way, but customers are using it here. Lean in on that and ask them, well, how are you using it? Why are you using it that way? You go back and align that to the long-range plans of the organization. Chances are there's a big gap in execution where they've got a big vision and a big target. They don't know how to get there. So how do you take a malleable platform and create a vision around that that says, oh, you're trying to align and move up market? What have you had better insight into the customer profile that you're”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you ask them what their passions are, what they're most proud of, what's a deal where they create a demand that never existed before, and someone's either going to get excited and passionate, or they're going to look at you like you've got two heads. You ask those qualifying questions. It's very easy to determine where do they fit in. If you're going to move into the enterprise and do material deals that are going to break records, you've got to have a closer that's super passionate. So I just ask this qualifying questions and people will make that answer super easy to follow.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, it depends on the account. And so you look at a spectrum of SMB to strategic sales. The answer is going to be wildly different. I'll probably talk about the enterprise. So for me, it's about fit. So if I've got an account that has multiple reps on it, the team chemistry is really difficult, but I always want the closer up front because they have to carry it all the way from one end of the field all the way down. But I'm also going to want to bring in like a visionary. Sometimes they're more academic. They're super right brain, very creative. They can build a vision and bring the organization along. They may not be as comfortable closing. And then the third profile of people I want to pick up is the person that wants to go hunt and take down every deal. Let's see a bear shoot a bear. That's not something I was like super talented at. I wanted to go big game hunting, but if you're going to run an and business, you need a collection of those different skills and you put them all together. You want to find those people and then at a chemistry level, figure out, can they work together or do you have two alphas? If you have two alphas, it's never going to work. And I've screwed this up a few times, by the way.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, if you hire the right people that are just super competitive, it's like athletes on the field, they have the energive and the competitiveness that's going to far exceed any pressure that you could ever apply full stop. That's just the way that I operate. And so for me, if you get the right people involved, a lot of those problems go away. So how do you find fast horses? You hire a fast horse. And guess who they run with? They run with fast horses. Go find the best sales rep that you're going to go find and see who they hang out with in the office and socially. They hang out with top performers. They hang out with winners. And so whenever you're in the interview cycle, first question I always ask full stop is, hey, top rep, who are your friends? And should I have an opportunity to meet them? Because they're always going to know the best talent. And I think when you bring them in and you drive that competitiveness, all those problems go away.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's a challenge if you want the environment where people perform at their best, you need safety. If you want safety, they have to know that you're trusting them, that you've got their back. And if you have two different people competing in the same environment, I don't know if that creates the right environment. I would prefer to go all in and have their back. And if need be, I'll go on sales calls. I'll do all the work with them until they're ready to go out on their own. And that takes a lot of effort. But if you get the right person with the right potential, absolutely I'll invest in that person for a few quarters or a year and then they're off on the road. So I would probably just go with one. That's just my gut.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that you ask the word patience, yeah, that's a big part of it working with them. But I think the fastest and easiest way to do it is let's say you're going to have an established team that has two or three people on it. You're going to get someone up front leading like the quarterback that owns the whole process that's been there, done that. You're going to take the high potentials, put them inside that team. And then over time, they're naturally going to learn that process because they're following the leader and they're going to get there a whole lot faster. So doing it one by one as a sales leader would be really hard to like literally teach every seller. But if you selectively build teams in the right way, then you're having the team teach the team. And that starts to drive scalability and repeatability. And you're not doing everything yourself. So I think that's the way that you do that at scale. And also, if you get really good people that care about each other and their competitive, even if they're not on the same team, they want to help each other and you want to reward that and incent that and ask people to step up and help you. What you find is the best people, they want to teach. They're proud of their craft. They're proud of what they tried and worked. They want to help the new gal or the new guy.”
2023-03-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: The 3 Profiles of a Sales Rep, How to Negotiate in a Sales Process, How to Sell to a CFO & How You Should Shift Sales Messaging in a Downturn with Frank Fillmann, CRO @ Salesforce Australia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source