The Power of Community
• Naz Irani, David Maloof
• Types of community
○ Region
○ Social
○ Educational
○ Professional
○ Ethical
• New communities fostered over last 2 years
• Common ground - even with competitors or disparate technology stacks
• People leave teams where they don't feel a sense of community.
Trust
• Achint Sehgal
• Integrity, Ability, Dependability, Purpose
• Edelman Trust Barometer 2019: https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2019-02/2019_Edelman_Trust_Barometer_Global_Report.pdf
• Make Demos a Bi-directional conversation
• Ask Effective Closing Questions
• Eliminating filler words
Leading with Empathy
• Eric Rodwell, Ashley Gunderson
• Be willing to go down into "the hole" with your team member and feel what they feel
• Practising Empathy
• Lead by example
• Take care of yourself as well.
• Advocate for your employee and for your team.
• Hold your team accountable but you still have empathy
• Traffic cop example -
• Takeaways
○ What is the most useful thing I can do right now given person and context
○ Start with a personal check in
○ Really listen.
Hiring for Talent - Not your traditional Presales Profile
• Amin Ibrahim, Julia Welch, Brendan Sapience , Naz Irani
• People skills harder to teach than the scripting and technical knowledge
• Don't hire for skills that you can teach.
• How to handle when people don't fit.
• Hire for coachability
• Look out for how they take feedback and learn new skills
• Do a "dry run" for the final interview
• Be prepared to beat the process in the interview. Interact outside of just the meetings.
Extreme outcome orientation
• Andrew Braverman
• Rarely look at what the big outcomes our customers want.
• Context helps to determine the meaning.
• Value is something passed around the system between buyers, sellers, presales and other parts of the organization.
• Be aware of what your customer is doing as a business.
• "That's the salesperson's job" - no -we should have our own perspective on the customer's needs
• Stated vs actual purpose
The uphill battle to build presales influence
• Tony Francetic
• Tools for success of presales (vision, data, network)
• Presales at center of influence.
Internal/external