Data and Diagnosis-Driven Selling - with Mark Petruzzi, Author

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people, just like you, to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics at Measure Up podcast. Today, I am joined by Mark Petruzzi, my co-author of the Data and Diagnosis-Driven Selling book, recently published, a senior advisor to Bossard Consulting Group, Genpak, and the founder of Zenith AI. Today, we'll be covering four main topics with Mark. First, why write another sales book, the Data and Diagnosis-Driven Selling book?
Why the title is Data and Diagnosis-Driven Selling? The key takeaways from the book, and the value and challenges of having so many different industry titans involved in the book. So Mark, with that, would you take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest for a second time on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast?

**Mark Petruzzi** (1:27)
Awesome. It sounds great, Ray.
My journey to get here. Well, my journey includes a lot of work with you over the last couple of years, and that has been a pleasure. And writing this book has been another pleasure as well. So, you know, my background starts from a career or beginning in strategy consulting and moved into a great deal of very deep operating positions in early enterprise software, which very quickly moved into the beginnings of the world of SaaS and of SaaS software, software as a service, and then in a lot of ways back to strategy consulting, since I've done a lot of work with BCG and other companies since.
So it's really given me the opportunity to really be deep into the operating side of software as a service, and software as a service sales, and then, you know, being able to come out of that into more strategy work and helping my clients add productivity into their selling process and their go-to-market. So happy to be here with you today, and thank you for having me on.

**Ray Rike** (2:48)
I'm so happy to have you here. And, you know, you were at Oracle for several years, and that was one of the classic, very structured sales organizations.
But I have to ask you, even through all these, with enterprise technology companies, sales transformation practices at leading consulting firms, why did the industry need another book on sales process?

**Mark Petruzzi** (3:10)
Great question. And a question that I would say up until a few years ago, there wasn't as many needs or as much of a need for another book.
Even when we came out with Selling the Cloud, that was really a book that was very powerful and very well received, but there wasn't very much new in it. And it wasn't meant to have it. It was meant to really remind good sales leaders and good sales executives of some of the reasons why they're good. And sometimes we forget that and lose sight of that over a career.
The reason why there's a need for a book now and multiple books is because we have so much more capabilities nowadays than we ever have to impact and influence the go-to-market model. And that starts with data and data science and it evolves into now AI. And when I say AI, it's to always make sure we don't forget the power of predictive AI. And it's been around for years and I've been working deeply for five or six years in predictive AI. So, you know, with all the focus on the open AI and gen AI, the focus here is predictive AI as well. But now gen AI allows us to even find additional ways for productivity. So, you know, my answer to that is, you know, that there really isn't so many reasons for brand new sales books until you start looking at what the capabilities are today in selling, in sales tech as a whole. And, you know, leveraging that and reminding great sales reps and great CROs what's out there and, you know, what really can be done today with technology mixed with sales.

**Ray Rike** (5:15)
Well, I know when I first spoke to you and your co-authors, including Bob Scarperi and Paul Macchiori, you made a point of it to say there's a difference between another sales methodology, like Spend, Solution Selling, Sandler and a sales process. Mark, can you kind of define whether this is a new methodology or more about a new process and what the difference is?