Selling the Cloud - Part 1 with Paul Melchiorre and Mark Petruzzi

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS industry thought leaders, executives, and people just like you to discuss what metrics, KPIs, and benchmarks they use to enable better data-driven metrics-informed decisions that accelerate revenue performance and increase enterprise value. Now, on to today's show. welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by two enterprise B2B revenue legends, Paul Melchiorre and Mark Petruzzi. And they're also the authors of the recently released book Selling the Cloud. Today, in this first episode of Two with Mark and Paul, we will be covering these three main areas. The real role and responsibilities of an enterprise class B2B sales professional. second, the personality traits and behaviors that differentiate A players from the rest. And three, how to build a world class enterprise revenue generation engine. Mark, Paul, welcome to today's episode. And please give the audience a brief background of your journey to becoming guest on the Metrics at Major Up podcast.

**Paul Melchiorre** (1:23)
Well, hey Ray, thanks. This is Paul Melchiorre. I'm an operating partner at Stripes. It's a private equity firm in New York City. I've been doing that for a little over a year. Prior to that, it's about 35 plus years of operating experience. Starting out, early days of SAP as one of the first employees here in the United States and built that go-to-market organization through the 90s, a great experience. Then I went and did my first tour of duty in silicon Valley to help start up a company called Ariba. Was there pretty much for about 15 years from pre-revenue through IPO, through a major reduction during.com, and then selling to SAP in 2012 Did some work at a company called iPipeline as the president for an insurance software company. And then most recently, four years plus as the CRO and interim CEO at Anaplan, which we took public in 2018 And it was a great run operationally and now very excited to be on the side of selling money instead of software.

**Ray Rike** (2:20)
Great. welcome to the show, Paul, Mark.

**Mark Petruzzi** (2:22)
Great. Well, Ray, thank you as well. So I had a little different process here along the way, although Paul and I have been working together over, well, we'll say 20, 25 years not to really date us, but I started at the business school as a strategy consultant at a firm called The Mac Group, which was a Harvard based firm that was really at the time running circles around Bain and BCG and McKinsey. But that only happened for a couple of years. And then there was a transaction, a deal and the business kind of unraveled a little bit there, but it was a great three years or so, really learning business at the highest level.
And I took that kind of strategy consulting background directly into sales and sales leadership. And I've been an operator since then. And, but every role I take, a particular focus that I go on, I still function as a strategy consultant. So, and I think that's really one of the reasons why I think we're able to go into some of the areas of the book and really leverage some of the experiences that Paul and I have had. Couple of years or a couple of intros on roles. I was a Managing Director at Deloitte for about six years. I started two boutique consulting firms tied to the Cloud in the earliest days. I worked at Oracle at the same time that Mark Benioff did and worked very closely with him and his team and I was really offered an opportunity to engage into the salesforce.com ecosystem really early. So Cloud has been an area that I've been involved in again before. There's been a name and I've presently just to tie it back to where I'm today. I'm a Vice President over at Accenture with the N3 division, which we are a sales and marketing BPO outsourced vendor and very excited to be here. Thank you, Roy.

**Ray Rike** (4:08)
Well, let me see. A management consultant, an enterprise sales professionals, and yours truly a data geek. This will be a show that every member of the audience should really love. So let's jump into the first topic. So Paul, I really love the concept of grit and what an important attribute it is to enterprise sales professionals. Can you share any best practices regarding interviewing to really discover if a enterprise sales candidate possesses grit?

**Paul Melchiorre** (4:36)
You know, Ray, it's really hard. I've interviewed literally thousands of reps over the years, and it's difficult to determine. Everyone looks good in the interview. Their resume looks fantastic. They have great references. They all say they've made quota forever. But it's really what I look at is do I find a street fighter that's going to be successful in these large, complex accounts? Someone that was a A student at a B school because they didn't have everything handed to them, that maybe they were the first group that went to college in their family. You know, growing up in South Philly, that's what I felt I had. I had a street fighter mentality or grit, and I always thought that that was one of the most successful attributes that I brought to the selling profession. Look, this is a hard job. It's not nine to five. You get told, no, a lot of it's a very difficult environment to sell in, especially as you get into the higher enterprise levels of selling. And you need to have that. And so I always try to ask people about their upbringing, but within reason, you know, what kind of person were they growing up? Did they have everything handed to them? Or did they really have to make ends meet? And then also trying to explain a situation where they ran into some adversity and how they responded to it. And a lot of times you get to feel what that person is really made of underneath. Because I think at the end of the day, you're going to have these very difficult selling situations that require grit. And if you can identify that in an interview process, that really is going to help you hire better reps.