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

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, founder and CEO of RevOpSquared, 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 this second episode with Paul Melchiorre and Mark Petruzzi around Selling the Cloud. In the second half, we'll be covering three main areas. The power of know and learning to walk away, how to build trust and respect with your buyer, a key successful attribute for enterprise sales professionals, and the importance of customer success and why it's more than just an organization. So Paul, in the last episode, we talked about empathy, we talked about third level listening, but we also talked a little bit about the power of know and learning to walk away. Let's dive a little bit more into that and why you think the most successful sales professionals develop the skill of learning to walk away.

**Paul Melchiorre** (1:22)
Well, I think we describe it in the book, and I believe Melissa is our example, and I've worked with her. She's fantastic in that a good rep qualifies along every step of the process. And if you're not qualifying, then you're probably taking on a lot of exercises in futility around prospects that will never become customers. So I think it's really important to say no, that maybe this isn't a good fit for my particular product or service, or this isn't really a good time because I don't think I'm going to win this deal based upon the current criteria or the circumstances that are in place. So unless you're able to change the rules or change the criteria, or put it into your favor, you don't want to come in second place, right? I'd rather not participate than come in second. So I think no is an important word early in a sales process, in qualification, and then if you do win the business, it becomes very, very important when you deal with procurement.

**Mark Petruzzi** (2:23)
So Ray, there's another angle on this as well. I mean, that no from an RFP response is hugely powerful. The other side of it is when no does mean no, and that is when we find out we lost, and there's that typical reaction by so many in our space that they don't want to take no for an answer. And they push back and they throw super discounted pricing and they go up two levels in the organization, go to the CEO to complain about what happens. And I've seen that in enterprise software far too many times, but I've also seen the right approach here to really be able to go in there and to understand why you lost, to understand why a decision was made. And there's so many examples that Paul and I both have where we have done that and gotten phone calls four months, six months, four years later saying, you know what, we made that decision, it was close. We want you to come in now and fix all the problems we now have because I chose XYZ company and not yours. And there are companies that have made a living off of just fixing the mistakes of others as well along the way. So I think it's really important to just know that no means no. And there's ways to continue to build the things you describe, trust and respect by losing and losing the right way.

**Ray Rike** (3:45)
You know, here we are sitting on the podcast. We have people on the podcast that have had very successful careers because of enterprise sales processes. However, there's 50% of salespeople out there today who aren't making quota. It's four months to go and they're like, I don't have enough pipeline to make quotas. Every deal is a good deal. How do you weigh those two kind of dynamics? One is we know is the right long-term game to play, but short-term, if we don't make quota, we might not have a job next year.

**Paul Melchiorre** (4:18)
Let me take a crack at that Ray, because I come across this all the time where people don't have enough pipeline built, and that's a whole other topic where you could probably spend an additional podcast on for sure. But if you don't have a good pipeline, there's a very strong possibility you're going to chase crappy deals, waste your time, lose those deals, come in second or third after a long process where you would never even played in it, instead of taking that time to avoid that and go out and build the pipeline. So I always look when I'm measuring salespeople, obviously, if they're 100% a quota, I don't bother them. If they're not, they better be doing all the other things right. And one of the things they better be doing is building a quality pipeline because it's just like anything else, you can predict the future based upon the work that's being done today. And if they're building a very strong, high quality pipeline, not a pipeline just with a bunch of names you're going to lose, then the chances of that rep being successful longer term is probably good. So I'm very willing to maybe be more patient with someone not at 100% of quota that has a very strong ability to build a pipeline. Because eventually that pipeline will turn into revenue. But I think that panic approach to, hey, I'm just going to chase anything I can. Usually, even if you do get the business, you're probably going to have an attrition with that customer down the road. So it's never a good thing.