We’re back with another ICYMI event recap of our jam-packed Pavillion events calendar. We had 131 informative events scheduled in November, led by some of the top business leaders in the world. Let’s dive into event highlights from the month.
Salespeople: How to Make Your Product Sell Itself
The product-led motion is not a slot machine. You can’t pull a lever and expect money to start pouring in. But with customers now being more educated than ever before, an effective strategy can help your product sell itself.
In this webinar, Reprise’s Adam Jay and Mongo DB’s Randy Petkoff discuss how the sales process changes when you transition to product-led motion. Learn how reps leverage their product by educating customers instead of taking up hours on discovery calls or drawn-out demos.
Watch the replay to learn more about how to:
- Identify the ideal buying experience: What vendor behaviors pique the most interest? What are some snags that tend to turn off potential buyers?
- Deliver value with product-led growth (PLG): Product-led motions differ from traditional selling models.
- Peak interest: The most important aspect of PLG is allowing customers to play with a product before purchase.
- Respect the customer’s timeline: A product-led motion creates a different standard timeline for customers. If a rep pushes a customer into a product before they’re ready, the timeline can break down.
- Prove your customers right: When a customer is free to explore a product independently, a rep’s most important job is simply helping them find that “ah-ha” moment that makes them love the product.
Cold Call Prep: Tips for Building the Foundation for an Effective Call Block
Despite popular belief, cold calling is not dead. It’s more effective than ever because fewer people are doing it, and even fewer are doing it well. Cold calling is not something you can automate, and it’s a simple fact that people love to talk.
In this webinar, Kyle Colman and Thomas Boccard discuss how to turn a cold call into a warm call. Not only can cold calling lead to more success immediately in terms of securing meetings, generating sales, and building relationships, but it also helps build a skillset that many peers are lacking — how to drive a conversation with executives and hold a room.
Here are some of the highlights from Kyle and Thomas’ conversation:
- Cold calling skills help long-term: A 1 to 5-minute cold call can help you gain more than any email you could write.
- It’s not easy to do, but it is effective: Getting rejected nine out of every ten calls is not easy. But that 1 in 10 times that leads to success is where you grow.
- Key cold calling KPIs: Every cold caller needs to be mindful of two metrics: call-to-connect rate and how many conversations lead to success.
- “You fall to the level of your preparation.” In cold calling, preparation is everything. Start every cold call with a checklist that details who you’re calling, what you’re going to say, and the goals for each call.
- Small bricks build big houses: Creating micro-goals is imperative. Visualize outcomes, stay positive, and strive to achieve the duration of every call block.
State of Sales Development
Over the past few years, Pavilion and Operatix have teamed up to dig into the state of sales development — and much has changed in that time.
In our 2020 survey, Pavilion and Operatix found that only 37% of businesses allowed their SDRs to work remotely. In our most recent survey, that figure has jumped to 94%. This one data point has touched nearly all points of sales development.
As the industry continues to rewrite this playbook, businesses are finding new and powerful ways to build camaraderie and bolster the impact and accountability of their SDR teams. The results of this survey span the following topics:
- Hiring: With 11,000 current open positions in sales tech jobs, Kyle Colman gives an overview of candidate profiles in 2021
- Channel utilization: Between email, cold calling, LinkedIn, and beyond, what outbound channel is the most successful?
- Compensation: What is the total OTE for a 1st-year SDR compared to a 2nd- and 3rd- year SDR?
- Performance metrics: What is the expected growth path for members of an SDR team?
- Career pathing: How many promoted SDRs have over 100% attainment in their next role?
Leading Through Change: Lessons From a CEO, a CMO, and VP of Sales
As the adage goes, the only constant is change — and change can be uncomfortable. However, change is also growth.
Humans, and especially team leaders, like to plan — but the fear of change can often fly in the face of that agenda. Thankfully, in this hour-long roundtable discussion, Pavilion assembled a small group of dynamic leaders to explain why it’s important for team leaders to get comfortable with the uncomfortable.
In this webinar, Michelle Benfer of HubSpot, Allison McCloud of Flywire, and Sarah Milby at Valor Performance talk about facing change within a team and an organization head-on. Here are several highlights from the discussion:
- Over-communicate in times of change: When change is on the horizon for an organization, a team leader should ensure that their team sees that as an opportunity. Encouraging a team to create a new skill or take on a new project can help people feel more control.
- Articulate a clear strategy: An elevator pitch isn’t just a sales tactic — a good leader can also use it to articulate an organizational strategy to their team. Not only where we want to be in a year, but where we will be in three years, and how we will get there together.
- Foster adaptation and agility with your team: Create a safe space to talk about change with your team and what makes it difficult. It’s important to have empathy for those who are comfortable with the way things are.
- Don’t forget to manage yourself: Many leaders are so laser-focused on managing their team that they fail to manage themselves. Make sure leaders are looking inward.
- Get outside perspective: It can be lonely at the top, which is why it’s so important to set aside time to meet with other executives or coaching leaders to gain external perspectives. Learn new playbooks and strategies to cultivate your team.
How Human-Centered Design Changed the Sales Operations Game for T-Mobile
In this webinar, T-Mobile’s Carolyn Kidder and Skuid’s Wade Callison discuss how they were able to form a partnership to create a more nimble multi-edit system for T-Mobile’s sellers.
As Senior Manager of Sales Enablement at T-Mobile, Kidder’s role in sales ops is to be constantly focused on the selling motion tools that support T-Mobile’s sellers. By optimizing the tools they have and integrating new tools, Kidder’s team is focused on making sellers more productive so they are able to get out there and connect with more customers as efficiently as possible.
That’s why, in an extremely complicated sales technology landscape, Kidder turned to Skuid for a human-centered design for their multi-edit system. Here are some of the highlights from their conversation:
- What is a human-centered design? Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.
- Characteristics and benefits of a human-centered app
- Utility: I can accomplish my task with this app to meet my goals
- Efficiency: I can perform my tasks faster than the available alternative solutions
- Clarity: I can quickly see how the app works and use it without any training
- Affinity: The visual design inspires confidence and a “natural liking” of the app
- Human-centered design process. Empathising with users, defining goals, and getting to the right results in a 6-week timeline
- T-Mobile’s implementation process with human-centered design. How T-Mobile and Skuid created a one-stop-shop for their sellers by creating a “sales cockpit” that optimized and organized the seller experience.
How Fintech is Revolutionizing Spend Management
Traditionally, an employee traveling for a business conference fronts their own money for expenses, saves the receipt, then waits a few weeks for the finance team to sift through the receipts and reports. It’s a huge time suck, without much automation or transparency to help the process along.
Now, Fintech and services like TripActions Liquid are changing that. Fintech revolutionizes spend management by prioritizing automated expense management to drive cost-saving productivity.
In this webinar, TripActions’ Desiree Ma leads a discussion with Angelina Colombo of Fast and Stephen Coveleski of Campus Cooks about how Fintech has increased transparency and helped their business grow.
Here are some of the highlights from their discussion:
- Automated manual tasks: Finance teams are used to handling travel, payments, and expenses manually, which can take up valuable time. Services like Liquid are automating that process, providing analytics on where money is being spent, and locating management in one place.
- Interactive dashboards: Instead of looking back at the end of the month to see where employees are spending money, businesses have access to interactive dashboards that provide real-time transaction transparency for employees and for finance teams.
- Liquid cards: With new innovative smart cards, a trip to Starbucks on the road is automatically uploaded and approved. This saves time for both the traveler and the finance team.
