Selling the Cloud - Part 2 with Paul Melchiorre and Mark Petruzzi Artwork

Metrics that Measure Up

B2B SaaS and Cloud founders, CEOs, and Go-To-Market operating executives share their journey as they scaled their business from $0M ARR to $100M and beyond. The guests share their insights on measurements of success, performance metrics, and benchmarks they use to guide and inform their decision-making and growth journey.Guests include founders and CEOs of amazing success stories such as LinkedIn, DocuSign, Marketo, Gainsight, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, ringDNA, InsightSquared, Cloudera and Gong. Beyond founders and CEOs, we also speak with leading Venture Capitalists, Go-To-Market executives and industry thought leaders who share their experience and insights into customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer expansion best practices.

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Metrics that Measure Up

Selling the Cloud - Part 2 with Paul Melchiorre and Mark Petruzzi

December 23, 2020 • Ray Rike

In this episode, we continue the discussion with the authors of Selling the Cloud. Building upon the first half of our conversation where we discussed the need for grit and passion to be success full in Enterprise sales, we move into several new topics.

The Power of No is a key skill to develop. A great enterprise sales professional is qualifying prospects out every step of the process to reduce time investment on low probability to close opportunities. Often the most important "no" is to walk away from blind RFP's that you have had no opportunity to influence or understand before receiving.

The other skill is to understand "no means no" but also to ensure the prospect understands you are available to help if they need to re-evaluate their decision that did not include you.

The importance of credibility and trust, often starts with the enterprise sales professional knowing when to walk away from an opportunity where you know your solution is not appropriate. Buyers will respect your integrity, and your trust capital over the long term will grow.

One fundamental step to being able to walk away from poor fit deals - investing more time in building a high quality, healthy pipeline. If you build more pipeline than you think is required, you will not force-fit your solution into opportunities you should have walked away from in the first place.

We discussed their hot take that "opportunities close themselves". If the enterprise sales professionals manage the process by ensuring the buyer has all of the information they need to make a decision, that closing is a natural step, and not the primary objective!?

We also discuss why Customer Success is not just a department - it is the responsibility of everyone who touches the customer, especially sales. In today's land and expand, recurring revenue model, having a Chief Revenue Officer who owns customer acquisition, expansion and retention is a key element to ensuring customer success is a culture...not just a function.

Finally, we bring out the crystal ball by having Mark and Paul share their perspectives on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will impact Selling the Cloud...if you are an Enterprise sales professional you will like what they have to say which is AI will serve to decrease the time spent on administration and increase the time available to invest in serving the prospect!!!