YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Goldberg

lines on the record: 56
first: 2023-12-13
most recent: 2023-12-13
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

“I've worked at many companies back in the day when we were at Salesforce. I think Salesforce did it so good. I spent almost 10 years of Salesforce. I know that you had a listening interview with Mark Benioff and he cultivated such a culture of perfection that people wanted to win for him. He cultivated so many incredible leaders. And that company just had such an incredible sales process because you think about our market. You can say, well, at that point, Siebel and Oracle were the big People Soft SAP, Microsoft. They were, no one even knew about Salesforce. He just created so much talent around a process that we built a process around helping companies be more agile, be more flexible, put your day in the cloud. Were you crazy? Put your day in the sales process was around trust us. We'll show you our security. We'll show you our uptime and downtime in the market. And we would be very transparent with our customers. And we just had such an incredible sales process designed and built.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of salespeople are selfish. They're selfish with their time. I don't think there's any better job than being an enterprise salesperson with a great company in a great market with a great product. All I had to do was think about myself, my schedule, my time, my schedule. That's all I cared about. But when I started to have kids, my schedule, my personal schedule changed. I had to like be a little more organized. I had to think for other people. Now I have three kids. I had to like think about them and my family. And it started to get me thinking you go from catching the ball in the end zone as a seller to being on the sideline coaching and being able to like having kids. I'm trying to like teach them and help them. And it just changed me to thinking I want to help coach people and coach salespeople to get them to be the best of them. Like now I love watching people improve. I love watching people get promoted. I love, I love if I say something and all of a sudden I see them put it in action or they tell me what they did and through a coaching initiative, I love that. I wasn't thinking like that.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most often they think they are. I think something in some cases like that's a change within your life. Like if you go, you get married. All of a sudden you have to think differently. You're thinking about you and somebody else. You start to have kids. You're thinking about your thought process changes. So I would give that same advice is that study, be obsessed with what you're trying to do and be obsessed with learning. And there's this quote I heard the other day. It's like, why is a lion the king of the jungle if you think about it? Like, why? They're not the strongest, like the elephant is the strongest. They're not the fastest. The cheetah is the fastest. There's many animals that are smarter than them in the jungle, but they're obsessed with winning. And I think that's what people, they need to be obsessed with learning. They need to be obsessed with improving. They need to be obsessed with improving. And when I see people do deals, big deals is because they're obsessed with the customer. They're obsessed with the relationship and they're maniacally focused and they're going to do whatever they possibly can to win. There's people that hate to lose, but there's not many people that really know how to win. You got to be obsessed with winning.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Move until you're ready to move. Some people move too quick. Because if I did that too quick, I couldn't give the advice I give to people because I've lived their roles. I lived in those roles. And I think it's really important that people try to move on too quick. I've seen so many first line managers just want to do anything to be a second line manager, but they're not ready for it. And I've seen sellers want to be first line managers, but they're not ready for it. They're not in a good headspace.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is kind of a crazy thing that just kind of came to mind. I saw this quote the other day. So, well, someone gave me advice, and I'll tell you what this is. Some gave me advice when I was in college. Same advice. And I walked into a restaurant sitting at the bar with another person who was sitting next to me. And I was waiting for my parents to meet me to go have dinner. I was just graduating college. And this guy was sitting at a bar and he looks to me and he says, I can give you any advice, know your trade before you're ready to move to the next role. And I had no idea what he was talking about. I'm like, what do you mean know my trade? Like, what does that really mean? And then it hit me. Like I started my career. I was in recruiting. And then I moved in. I was in SDR. And what he meant was like, know your trade. So when you're an SDR, get really good at being an SDR before you're ready to go into sales. And then get really good at enterprise sales or sales or whatever you're selling before you're ready to move into management. And I wasn't ready to move into management until I started to have kids and I got married because my life changed like the way I thought about things changed. I took that advice and I would say don't.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's so many. Creativity could be that someone's on vacation and you need to figure out how to find the person on vacation so they will sign the contract because their timeline might not be your contract. I've had times where people have been skiing and this is where it gets a little, you want to balance out not being like creepy, but like you find out where they are on vacation, you might just send them flowers and just, hey, just remember them. You know, I'm out there, you know, just remember me. You know, I've had reps do that where they might find out not in a creepy way because they built a relationships where they've someone might have been on a ski trip and they, when they got back to the room, they had a bottle of wine there for them or something, just to remind them. And someone says, thanks. And they come up for air and they're like, hey, remember me. Hey, oh yeah, that's right. I forgot. Sorry, I was with my family.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the adage of let's go golfing and hang out on the weekends and go and kind of all those things are just like not as I think people look at their time and that's changing a bit in terms of like the different lunches and the golfing and those things have changed.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there'll be parts of the market that it does replace, like maybe more some of the transactional business, maybe some of inbound capabilities, but I think we're a bit away from that. I think people are going to be over rotating in some cases and they're going to learn. Kind of like the IVR. Remember we used to call an IVR and you'd be like, press one and you'd speak into the phone and it wasn't the best experience. I think there's going to be some of that, but I do think over time it will, but our philosophy and my view is it's going to give you better insights on what to do next.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI is going to make people smarter and is going to bring information to them so they have better insights on how to have smarter conversations with their customers.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, look, some people will never be able to have those tough conversations. Some people won't want to have it. And it doesn't mean that they're not good at what they do. It's just, this is where you may need to tee it up so someone else can have that tough conversation.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I've learned was that you can't be afraid to have the tough conversation. You just, you can never be afraid because if you don't have it, then somebody else will. And this is where you got to balance things out. Like I've had some of the best sellers in the world when I was a first line manager. They were the best relationship people, the best, but they couldn't close because they couldn't have the tough conversation. So my job as the RVP in that case was to have those tough conversations and to leverage their strength and leverage my strength. And so you need that balancing act. You need teams.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person in there because there's going to be a point that you've got to go and have the tough conversation and you can't be afraid, you can't admire, you can't be afraid of it. And in some cases, things need to get uncomfortable before they get comfortable.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're aligning to her to plan to be able to do something in the timeline that works for both of you. You talk about compelling events and how do you back into compelling events? And I think that's also really important. But at the end of the day, I do think relationships matter because a procurement person, if they're told what to do by the buyers, they'll work towards those dates. I think you've got to have those relationships because you're going to win and lose a deal a hundred times before you actually win it. You're going to feel like you've lost. The deal is done. You've got to be okay with that. But you got to pick it up every day and you got to figure out how to bring it back together because you're going to lose it three or four times during the day. You know, you've just got to be able to pick it up. And if you don't have those tentacles, you go back to CEOs. Do they have to close business? What's really important is that you're not single thread in an account and you've got your managers and all the different people. I call selling as a team sport. Our organization, I've never been in an environment where it's your territory. Go read me the news. We make the news together. And so it's a team sport. We sell together. So very rarely do we have a deal that we only have.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a respect component of that where you build relationships and you're working towards a moment in time where you've got to have a tough conversation. You don't want to have it to be a surprise. You don't want to ever do anything unnatural. But at the end of the day, we do work in months and quarters. And there's going to be time throughout the relationship that you're going to ask me for something and I'm going to ask you for something. Right now what I'm asking you for not to do anything unnatural, but if you can do it in this timeline, we'd appreciate it. Now you don't have to, but we would really appreciate it. But that's why the mutual plan is so important. So you're not just having to do something unnatural and throw a Hail Mary at the end of the quarter, end of the month. I mean, that happens in certain cases, but if you align on the deal reviews and the process and the structure, you're having these.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's in place. I always try to get, and I coach my team on you don't want any winners or losers in these negotiations. You really want to try to avoid that and you don't want any take it or leave it. You want to work with them to figure out at the end of the day how you can both feel good about the relationship. Because when procurement leaves, when the buying leaves, you're focusing on helping them be successful. You want to kind of get through the contract, but you don't want a bad contract to dictate a bad relationship.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, no, it should never be a flat no, but I care more about what's in the contract than how much they're paying us, meaning in our business, being a workflow platform, there's consulting capabilities that we need to bring into the process. There's support and services pieces in there. And I want to make sure that the relationship is set up so they can be self-sustaining and that we can integrate truly into their workflow. I care more about that, and procurement cares a lot about, I want to see what my per unit price is. They want to understand what their per unit price is. So we can work with them on making sure we fit within their budgeting cycle, but I care a lot about making sure the customer is set up for success because negotiating many, many deals right now or all the time. And my point to them would be, yeah, you may look good because you got this per unit price down. But in six months from now, when the business unit comes to you and says, well, I'm not getting any value out of the product, then how are you going to fail then? We've got to figure out and meet somewhere in the middle because, yeah, we'll make sure we give you the right structure.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got to focus on the how, and you got to stay maniacally focused on the how. A lot of companies focus on the what. There's a lot of what out there. Here's what we do. Here's our value prop. Here's how we do that. Focus on what you're delivering for them and how you're going to help them. But you got to prove it. You got to show them every single day. And you've got to be maniacally focused on showing them the how. And you got to, it goes back to solving the right business problem, but you got to constantly be in front of them, showing them how you're helping them, how you're helping them hit these targets, how you're helping them solve the problems. Not only when you get the deal done, when you get the deal done, the relationship just starts.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deep analysis on their business use case, and it's deep analysis on if they get stuck on a three-step cadence, but they're not running it through a five-step cadence. And we see if that's happening or we see some integrations are off, we can get really proactive and fix them proactively. And then we have these EBRs that we run every quarter with our customers. And we have processes in place on how we do that. And we meet with, that's how you get hired in the organization. We meet with, you know, the leaders in the organization show them the insights of what they're doing with recommendations on how to improve.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes. We've changed our whole adoption strategy to outcomes versus adoption because nobody cares if I come to you and say, here's how many logins you have. Here's how many activities you had. What you want to know is what is my pipeline metrics been and how am I coming in every quarter to my pipeline targets and what are my outcomes around revenue that I'm driving with your platform? And so we've changed our whole adoption metrics to outcome metrics. And we know all the leading indicators that get the outcomes. And we design health scores around every single one of our customers. And we could see be proactive when it triggers from a green to a yellow and what created that that will all of a sudden start to drive leveraging our platform, workflow and activity and thought leadership and content out to them. And the CSM will follow right up once we see something change.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you have to be very proactive about it. It goes back to the skill set you put in the post-sales side so they can start to look at data to show their customers the insights and the value that you're creating for them. And remember, the CFO is the buyer now for every renewal. If you're not showing them insights around business value, then you're not going to be renewed.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the reasons that we changed our process is that I just talked to you about earlier is that we were starting to see based on our data that we were seeing more churn because of the way our process was set up where the AMs were seeing more downgrades, but they weren't seeing cancellations. They were seeing more downgrades of users just downgrading in certain segments of the market. So in like companies that we were selling to tech companies that sold to other tech companies. So we saw that and we had to stop that trend right away. So we started to change our process around a set of customers a set of data that we saw in the market quickly. That's one example.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think Revenue Ops is probably the most valuable role in company. And you're going to start to see the evolution of RevOps moving into the CRO world when you start bringing data and science together. I think you want to hire an analyst, like a really good analyst early on at about, say, $5 million to really start to analyze your process, because a great CEO, very passionate, but they got to be able to make decisions based on data, not just based on gut. And by 5 million, you're going to start to use some data and some AI that you can start to incorporate some AI. So you want to hire a really smart analyst. And as you grow to 10 million, maybe two analysts, when you get to 20 million, you're going to need someone who's got some management experience kind of seeing that ship around really building a strong kind of rev ops organization. RevOps, I couldn't survive without a great, I've got an incredible Rev Ops leader.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Need a process. And I think most founders are very passionate with what they do. Maybe they're more on the product side or more on the marketing side, but not many have the experience in a go-to-market and building an enterprise company or an enterprise process. And I think that's a much different world where you need RevOps and enablement and you need to put infrastructure in place. And I don't think that most founders have that experience.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a conversation with our previous founder, Kyle Porter, and he was so passionate about our company and our product and our features. And him and I would talk about this a lot. And he'd say, Steve, what I realized when you and I met was that I can convince one person to do anything about my product. I can convince one person that our product is the best product ever. But what you helped me do, help us do as a company is convince multiple people in a company that we can solve their problem and it's great for them and they got to move down the process. That was kind of an aha moment when I got here. We were about 50 million in revenue. And we got there early on by just being so passionate about what we do. And but we didn't have a process. We were really great about talking about our product. And we were a product company at that point. We weren't a platform. And we shifted now to be more of a platform. And it's a very different sell. So when you sell a product, what I found is most founders are so passionate about it and passion gets you to a point. But at some point, you got to get to a point that you need a...”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's different in each segment. It's different in terms of if you're selling into a commercial business or if you're selling into an enterprise business, it's got to be designed and architected into those businesses. It is the kind of gravitational pull that you want to drive within your process to make sure that the sales process is set up so it's on your wheelhouse. So everybody's competing with you. And it's got to be consistent in how you do it. And it's got to be very tactical and very strategic. My job is to architect those across an enterprise business and across a commercial business and make sure that you want to give people some of the flexibility, like their manager some flexibility, but they've got to work in your framework.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, CEOs should never be RVPs. They should never be the ones that are actually closing deals. That's my job. What they CEOs should give the customer the confidence about our vision and what we are doing as a company. I'd never like to put my CEO in a position where he's actually, he or she is having a closed business. Their job is to align with other maybe CEO and other executives to give them comfort that they're making the right bet on the right company. They should not be closing business. I strongly believe when you do big deals, they buy into your company. They buy into your culture. They buy into your innovation. They buy into what you're doing. And you've got so many tentacles within your organization that they buy into you. And it's kind of called the shiny penny in a way you become the shiny penny of each other's companies and everybody rallies around them. So it's not just the CEO, it's multiple people in the organization. It's aligning CFOs. It's aligning chief technology officers. It's aligning chief product officers. And it's aligning CEOs.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got to change your process. You got to change your profile of the people you're bringing in. The way I was explaining to you is that you've got to change the profile of the people you're putting into those roles.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've talked about this actually a while ago. Look, I think that the skill set of a CS person is different. We were at Salesforce back early on in the day, we created this customer success manager. We were the first companies to do it. It hasn't changed since then. A lot of customer success organizations are really a first line for support because they're hanging out with the people. Remember I told you about? They're hanging out with the people that they sold the first product to and they're just answering questions. They're not able to be proactive. They're not able to get strategic. They're not able to help them get to these outcomes because they're just solving how-to problems with like the admins and the operations people. And so I think what Chris is talking about doing is that he probably believes, and I believe this as well, a lot of times when things aren't, when you're losing customers is you lose access to the buyers. You lose access to the people of power. Because you do a deal year up here, all of a sudden you're implementing it. Now you're down here. And then when it's implemented, now you're down here. You've got to stay up here.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What makes us unique is our ability to make our customer successful, meaning we get to the specific outcomes they're looking for, but it's so hard to show that in a sales process, so you've got to actually show that. They got to see what it's like to work with you.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the second thing we changed. You have to bring the CS team into the selling process. Remember, I talked to you about the what and the how this team is the how. So you bring them into the pre-sales process so the customer can feel comfortable with the customer journey and how you're going to make them successful. And they've got the confidence in that so they know what they're buying into early on. And then we build these production environments because we're in a very competitive market. And everybody says they kind of do the same thing with similar value props. So we have to go in there and say, all right, we're going to build this production environment and we're going to align to a use case. We're going to build out the business case. And then we're going to put it in production and show you exactly how we're going to do this. So you're going to understand what it's like to work with us even before you're a customer. Our win rate and attach rate to that is pretty incredible as we go into this year. So we made all these changes this year. And I've heard some of other CROs talk about the handoff and they do it after the implementation. You got to do it as part of the early selling process.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the old way was not working. We were just getting downgrade after downgrade, and a lot of it was because we were selling into other use cases. We were just hanging out with the people we sold to. And they were just, they didn't have as many people to support”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every year because they were growing at huge rates. But what happened in the past year was that these account managers were just hanging out with the same people that they sold the original deal to. And instead of buying 100 licenses, they're like, I only have 50 people at the company now. So we saw a lot of downgrades. So we shifted to a hunter-hunter model and we shifted our process. We had to change the profile of a salesperson, of an AM to a hunter. And everybody had an interview for their role. And we opened it up to the outside and their job, and we took the renewal away from the AM, we moved it to a renewal manager in CS. And we are now calling a count executive owns new logos. Three months, they own it, maybe a couple they can keep. Then right away, they pass it over to a client account exec whose job is to build relationships across the organization, to sell find new used cases that they can sell into. Not just hang out with the same people. So we went through this whole process change this year.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me give you a couple examples of that. So, you know, like you ever been on a beach and it looks beautiful, the sun's setting tides in, looking outside. It looks beautiful, right? Then all of a sudden the tide goes out. And now you're looking at, wow, there's a huge reef over there. Oh my God, there's a shipwreck over there. Look at all those rocks. I had no idea those were there. Well, that's what's happened this year. You have to change your process. What we found for an example, two things that we did this year. So we have a commercial business, which is about one employee to 700 to 50 employees, and we had a hunter farmer model in that commercial business where we had sellers would sell a deal and they would own it for a year, then they'd pass it off to an AM who would just farm. And in the past, they were, people were just...”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is going back to the previous conversation around high performance cultures, companies are doing more with less. A lot of companies out there have restructured. Big companies had tons of overlays that can help kind of talk about features and functions. They really don't anymore. Smaller companies have minimized their street quota and lowered their targets, but they're putting more emphasis on doing more with less and focus a lot on enablement. You have to be able to truly enable your teens. My CFO talks about this a lot, is this year is about getting better, next year is about getting bigger. And so you've got to get better with a core group because great people want to be surrounded by great people. Great people want to be around people that are like them, building that culture and instilling it into them around making sure that we're truly solving the biggest problem a company has. Number one and number two, you found the change agents or in an organization that want to make change.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, budget, everything goes to the CFL, but no, they're not shut down for business. We actually just did one of the bigger deals in the company history just very recently. Back in the financial crisis in 2008, when I was at Salesforce, we did some of the biggest deals at the time in the company history at that point. Because when you have problems and there's change going on, people solve big, big problems and they will solve it outside of their budget cycle. But you've got to really truly make sure that you're solving really big problems. And by the way, every renewal is a new deal too. You have to treat every renewal because every renewal is going to the CFO. The first question my CFO asked me is, somebody's up for renewal is what if you didn't have it? And that's what every CFO is asking.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, what we do is we do case studies, for an example. So we'll have them come in and do discovery because our business is very big on discovery and making sure you clearly understand the problem you're solving, especially in this day and age. You have to be solving problems. People don't buy features. They solve problems. And it has to be the biggest problem, the top three problems the company has. So we go through a process where they have to do a discovery call with a sales leader, a couple sales leaders, and really go through that due diligence and then come back and present the unique value problem, the business case, and also the how. A lot of people focus on the what. We also have them present the how. Like, how are you going to help us get to that problem and how are you going to help us solve that problem? Not just what you're going to do to solve that problem. And so we absolutely go through that as a big part of our process.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to see how people make decisions. I want to see people stop process for how they make decisions. I want to see if people could be consistent. And they don't just give up. They're obsessed with winning, and they're very competitive. Naturally, you look for trends that people make throughout their life and you look for consistencies. Then you look at their career. And if they jumped around like, tell me why you left this role to go to this role. Tell me why, okay, you start off as an SDR, you were there for nine months, and then you went to another company, be an SDR. Why didn't you wait? What happened? How'd you make that decision? Then you start to look for trends, scenarios, and you could start to assess what you see is when you miss You can look at backwards on people that didn't work out of your company the same trends that you caught. They maybe admired the problem in the interview process and you were just trying to fill street quota and you didn't dig in deep enough.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, you've got to really look for grit. And what we do in our interview process, one of the most valuable things is we do top grades with everybody. And in a top grade, we'll spend two to three hours with you. And we'll have you walk us through your life. Walk us through the decisions you made in elementary school that you can remember. Walk us through, okay, now you went, you got to be your freshman year and you decided, say you had a coach, you decided you were a quarterback and walk me through like, how'd you make that decision? And then, okay, so now you're in college. You went to this school. Why did you go like you had two decisions to make? Why'd you go here versus here?”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think they are. I think there's a set of people that are. I think there's a broader set of people that are not. You could see it when it doesn't work out in your glass door reviews, for example. If you're saying you're going to be a performance-driven culture, you've got to be a performance-driven culture. And you're going to get some challenging glass door reviews out there. You're going to get people saying some negative things, but you got to commit to it. And you've got to commit to that process. But if you're consistent with it and you have to have integrity, you treat people with the utmost respect in this process. But you've got to be able to ask the questions because to your point earlier, it's really not okay when you get surprised towards the end. And if it happens once, okay, if it happens twice, now you start to get some consistency in the same people that are missing it multiple times, then you got to start looking at the first line manager. It's like, well, how are you missing this?”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The market has changed from a nurturing market to a performance driven market, and that's happened probably over the last six to nine months. And it was really hard to drive that process in place because people would like to be asked questions, for example. But we still drove that process. And in my experience, when I grew up, I was at Siebel and I was a Salesforce. If you showed up once and didn't have it together, you maybe got invited back twice, but there was no third time if you didn't have it. And that's just the environment I grew up in. Now, the market's not like that as it is today, but the expectation of the discipline that is getting back to that model. Like the market is getting back to driving that process. And a lot of the people that have grown up in this industry over the past, say, five to 10, 7, 8 years, they haven't seen this.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you talked about Dave Vernitsky for an example. Dave Vernitsky is the master at forecasting, the master for it. I've worked for Dave for probably 10 years. And he had his forecast call every Friday at 10 o'clock. You had to be prepared for that meeting because he would go through every opportunity and he'd go through everyone. We'd have seller notes, next steps, and manager notes next step. And he'd like, all right, Steve, this deal, talk about it. Tell me what's going on. And he'd go into so much detail. And if he figured out there was a gap, he would just dig into that gap. And then we move on. And so I would do the same thing with my team. And then they would do the same thing because I couldn't show a unprepared. So what it does was it really minimized surprises. He would go through the month, every deal in a month, every deal in CTP, every deal in best case and every deal in long shot.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the goal of enabling that the first line manager is the most important kind of aspect of any process because they're the ones that have to be having the one-on-ones, weekly and daily. They're the ones that have to be able to understand that. So when I do deal reviews, not only do we do deal reviews with the sellers, but I also do deal reviews separately with a first-time managers. And then you triangulate.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're trying to understand power. We're trying to understand one do we truly understand the problem we're trying to solve? Do we truly understand what our unique value proposition is in that process? And has the buyer bought off on that? And then you go through the med pick process and understand like, what do we know, what don't we know? And medpick is really just a qualification process. And the goal at the beginning of the quarter is to understand what you don't know. You look at org chart, but by the middle of the quarter, at some point, what I usually lock in on and by the middle of the quarter, we have to have agreed upon mutual plans in place and alignment on how we actually get to the end of the quarter. And then we have to measure that nonstop to continue to track all the activities that needs to happen. But obviously, you're going to close business early in the quarter as well. But if you've got that process in place every quarter, then you're going to have more consistency in actually closing business and not just waiting to the end of the quarter.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one, it's really the first line manager needs to own the deal reviews, they need to own the process. My job is to design and architect the whole overall system that people work within. So if I'm asking my second line and third line managers five questions, they need to be asking their teams the same five questions or the same ten questions. Their deal reviews are different at different stages of a quarter, for an example, or different stages of a year. At the beginning of the quarter, you're going to be asking a different set of questions because you're really going to just try to get an understanding of what's happening. But the whole goal of deal reviews are to understand why not something is going to happen, but also understand how do we actually untie not because managers, my job and my job, my job is to untelpie knot.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's not a good excuse. There's never just like one champion. There's multiple people as part of the process. And it's always never the seller's fault. We talk about why we do deal reviews, why we have first line managers to really coach and manage their people. You do that so you minimize the surprises that happened at the end. You've got to naturally always be looking and always have these conversations with people. Going back to what is their personal win. If you go back and understand what this person's personal win is, you'll start to get a sense of how long they're going to be at that company or not. If they trust you, remember salespeople, the negative connotation versus I'm a problem solver, I'm here to help you get to your next role. And if they trust you, they may open up to you and say, hey, look, I'm not going to be here that long. I'm thinking about moving on. You've got to build that trust in these relationships. If not, you will get surprised. You will get surprised. And in that case, I never say it's your fault, but bad news never travels better with age, like wine. You've got to really assess that out.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it could be a director in certain accounts. The economic buyer could be the CFO, but the change agent could be a senior director of revenue operations who wants to be a vice president or a senior vice president, who wants to make a mark on something because they believe it so much that they're going to drive it through the organization because that's their next promotion.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can tell by their behavior. You could tell by how they communicate. You could tell by how they talk. You could tell by their body language in a meeting. You could tell by if you're in a meeting with them and other people, are they actually showing authority in that? Are they controlling the conversation? Are they controlling the meeting? You know, if you think most people out there, they look at the deals they've done, the big deals they've done. They've always had a change agent in there that's driving through the process, that's navigating through their own process. And you got to look at that person. I think what David told you earlier on was that I was able to always figure out where the true champion is in an organization and where the true change agent is in the organization. And that is really where the art. It's hard to teach that to a lot of your salespeople. When you talk about med pick and you talk about medic, a lot of people check boxes there. You can't let them check boxes. You've got to be able to ask the questions like we're talking about right now to ensure that that person really truly is a champion of change.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to look at the culture of a company you're selling to and the typical time people are enrolled. There's always people that remember politicians in very large companies are always trying to find their next way up. So you've got to find people that are on their way up, not on their way out. It's really important to navigate through that when you're selling to these larger companies.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, if they tell you they're the buyer, people usually tell you they're the buyer, they typically aren't. And if they tell you, don't talk to anyone else, just talk to me. I can navigate through this myself because you've got to be able to work together. Let's talk about an enterprise company right now. A lot of enterprise companies at the beginning of every year, people switch roles. So if you're selling to a very large enterprise company, you could be the CIO one day and then next year you could be the CRO. They move roles quite a bit. Or if you're the CMO and you've been there for, say, four months and you want to break some things, you want to try some things, you're kind of in the honeymoon so you can actually take that chance. You got to look at a company and how often they switch people's roles in the organization and what the tenure of that role typically is. And if they're two years into a role as a CMO, they might not have as much power as they did when they were like a year into that role.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More because I'm going to consume this technology or the service. And then you role play with them. And you can very quickly realize in that process, if they're truly a buyer or not, or what part of the buying process they go to or how they need to get to other people to help make decisions.”
2023-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source